3. How do I mount the VFAT partition so that an ordinary user can read/write to it?
See http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#4.5 and the next few entries in that section.
Thanks for the info on NTFS Paul, I will stick with the shared VFAT partition which works well if I stay logged in as root.
The link above doesn't answer my question number 3 however, which I believe is a *nix issue - how to mount the VFAT partition so that a non-root user has full permissions to read/write/execute the files?
Did you look at section 4.9 "How do I change the permissions of a mounted NTFS Volume?"?
Paul.