Mountig Windows partitions at boot in 8.04

[Nik N]

Here's what I did wrong: at installation time I specified mountpoint
somewhere other than in /media (it did not appear to me that permanent
partitions on the same drive as Ubuntu are "media" - to me "media"
implied "removable media"). My NTSF partitions are mounted, but do not
appear in Places or desktop (as they did in my 7.10 installation).

To be pragmatic about this, my question now is: How do I edit Places
menu? Menu editing in preferences ignores "Places". Any negative
consequences of editing it?
And why is the filesystem not included in "Places" - any reason I
shouldn't include it there (assuming I can somehow edit that list).
Any reason why NOT to remove "Documents", "Music", "Pictures"
<soapbox>who the heck keeps all his graphical image files in the same
hierarchy branch? - why did Ubuntu pick up from Redmond this notion
that users are not capable of dealing with the hierarchical file
sistems?</soapbox>

TIA,
Nik