Inconsistent storage.bus and storage.originating_device info

[Baz Walter]

hello

i'm writing a small application for portable audio players which needs 
to get the vendor_id and some properties from the portable_audio_player 
namespace. at the moment, i use dbus to search for all devices with 
storage.bus == usb, and then use the storage.originating_device to check 
the vendor_id.

unfortunately, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. what i'm 
finding is that (apparently ramdomly) the bus will be shown as "pci", 
the originating_device as "/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer", and 
all the portable_audio_player properties will be missing. other than 
showing the wrong information, though, the device works totally 
correctly (it's a Samsung YP-P3).

looking in gnome-device-manager i see that the SCSI Host Adapter for the 
  relevant Mass Storage Drive appears as a child of the USB Device 
rather than the USB Mass Storage Interface. The correct UMS interface is 
there - it just isn't linked to the correct SCSI Host Adapter.

so is this a problem with hal, or with hal-info?

is there a reliable way to get the relevant UMS Interface that doesn't 
depend on querying storage.originating_device?

some info about my setup:

distro: mandriva 2009.1
hal : 0.5.12-0.rc1.20090403.1mdv2009.1
hal-info : 0.0-5.20090414.1mdv2009.1
udev : 140-3.2mnb2
hotplug : 2.4.4-2mdv2009.1
kernel : 2.6.29.6-2mnb2
policykit : 0.9-5mdv2009.1
consolekit : 0.3.0-5mdv2009.1

TIA
baz walter