Rats... unmaintained. This is sad, really. About your wife problem, it might be due to a daemon being instructed by the DM to automatically mount and open any newly inserted memory card or USB devices appearing as such. I don't know about Gnome as I use XFCE, anyway on the removable media options there is one to auto mount removable media and I keep it unchecked. Their icons appear anyway on the desktop, but until I access them they don't get mounted so they remain accessible for other software. I'm sure there is such an option on Gnome too.