New to Xfce - questions

[Robert Moskowitz]

I am running Xfce on Fedora 21 - Xfce 4.10.1

I came to Xfce as it was the desktop on the Fedora-arm 19 remix and 
liked what I saw.  So with the move to F21, I made the transition from 
Gnome.  I have a lot 'solved', but a lot still not working as I need it.

I want automount of usb drives.  I changed the setting values, but no 
change in mounting status.  Drives still come up unmounted.  Do I have 
to logout and login to get this change to take affect?  Is there a 
reload feature (Gnome has one, but it does not always work).

I want to access my Samsung Galaxy via USB.  This worked, wierdly, on 
F20 and Gnome.  It is not working with F21 and Xfce.  Some digging in 
the Fedora archives shows that this is an MTP device and I need 
simple-mtpfs.  I installed this and 'simple-mtpfs -l' shows the phone, 
but it is not being mounted.  What else do I need?

Thunar does not show how many files are in a directory.  I am spoiled 
with both Nautilus and Nemo telling me how many files, rather than the 
size of the directory node.  Is this available.

A biggie is I do not like Xfce starting all my apps from my last login.  
It gets many wrong, and sometimes the reason for the reboot was things 
were not going right and I WANTED a clean start!  I run 4 copies of 
Thunderbird, each from a script pointing to their mail directories; 
autostart gets this wrong.  Multiple copies of Thunar all start up in 
one window.  Although it tries to get all of my copies of Firebird into 
the proper workspaces, many end up in the wrong workspace.  Etc.  So I 
want to turn this off.  The settings control for startup does not offer 
the option to NOT startup what you had last session.

Leafpad is nice, but I am use to gedit that supported tabbed windows for 
many files opened  in one copy of gedit for editing.  I may have a dozen 
files open at any one time in just a couple of copies of gedit.  Leafpad 
does not seem to support tabbed windows.  Am I missing a setting?  Is 
there a good option to Leafpad for editing text files?

I am running this on a Lenovo x120e and I have heating problems when 
both cpus are full out, so I want the sensors panel plugin.  But when I 
select 'show' a setting, it does not.  And when I open sensors again, 
whatever sensor I selected to 'show' is not selected.

A bigger problem is that screensaver is NOT turning off my display 
backlight.  The screen is blanked but still lit.  I cannot find any 
setting in power management about this.  Do others have this problem, or 
is this a Fedora 21 implementation issue?  F21 with Gnome Live CD does 
turn off the backlight on screensaver.

Generally I have figured out most things to get stuff how I want it.  
The above items will get me well along the way to be fully operational.

thank you