shared VFAT partition permissions for users

[spamse]

I have scoured the various posts on setting up a shared partition
several times, and manual documentation, and have succeeded in getting
the Windows partition accessible from Linux. I have achieved this by
the following entry in /etc/fstab:

# the windows shared partition
/dev/hde5               /home/win               vfat
async,user,exec,mode=777,unmask=000

However, the user logins are not automatically granted write
permissions. I am not entirely sure if I should be attempting to
retain Windows permissions, or simply override them in Linux. My
presumption here is that the mode variable should be giving full
permissions to all users.

Sam