Figured out why the nVidia display drivers had an issue with my
consoles: can't enable vga options on boot :( Did it without vga=789 in
grub.conf and now I have access to my consoles (although the font is
rather large now)

First new issue: no access to CD or Floppy with Nautilus. I've read
about a "Disk.." submenu when right-clicking on the desktop, I don't
have that. All I have is, in order:
  Open New Window
  Open Terminal
  Create Folder
  Create Launcher
  Clean Up By Name
  Keep Aligned
  Paste Files (disabled until I do a Copy Files)
  Use Default Background
  Change Desktop Background

After quite a bit of searching, still no answer as to why this is the
case, or what to do to fix it. My fstab permits all users to mount the
CD, also.

Second issue. Both using the nforce-audio drivers and the alsa drivers,
Gnome's sound recorder doesn't record anything from the mic, and
playback only results in: osscommon: Unable to open /dev/dsp (in use?).
I tried to re-emerge Gnome with esd, alsa and oss as USE variables, but
since it's already installed, it doesn't want to recompile with the new
options. I don't know if that's what the issue was either.

Hope someone has dealt with this before...

Thanks!