According to
this HAL is not completely necessary. I know that it is required for automounting, but I don't need automounting. I just would like an easy graphical way to manually mount. With experimentation, I have found that the custom right-click context menus you can make with Thunar can do just that. I have been trying FreeBSD 7 in a VM and HAL is causing nightmares. I think that I will go without it.
But I like the custom menu things. Just turn on vfs.usermount, make a ~/.mnt/<devices> directory, and some custom context options and it looks pretty easy.
Thanks all for the help.