Kernel 2.6.10 and later issues with USB

[thephotoman]

Well, I've installed Colony 4, and I've come across some issues that 
have actually been plauging me since Hoary, but now they're a little 
harder to circumvent.

The fact is that I have a large amount of USB-based external storage.  I 
use these disks quite frequently to get large files between my desktop 
and my laptop, which both run Ubuntu (Breezy as of yesterday).  However, 
there are problems with my desktop, USB, and kernels any newer than 
2.6.8.1, specifically that my mass storage devices don't show up in 
/dev.  What can I do to fix this problem, or is this a fix for the 
kernel team?