Is there a way to force read a USB flash drive on OSX 10.6.8 that shows up in the system profiler but not on the desktop?
You should be able to do it with terminal, in case it's just not mounted automatically


Open terminal
type diskutil list and hit enter
Check which disk you want to browse, I'll use disk3 in this example, and get the IDENTIFIER from the line that shows the device name. So in my example the line wold be 2:  Apple_HFS DiskName  999.9 GB   disk3s2
Type diskutil info /dev/disk3s2 and get the mount point. Mout it with diskutil mount  /dev/disk3s2
Now it should show up in finder.