Newbie question - sharing files on dual-boot XP and FC3

[Bob Brennan]

I have tried many ways of sharing files between an XP NTFS partition
and FC3 and have a few questions that I need help with:

I have 3 primary partitions set up by Partition Magic - XP NTFS,
shared VFAT, and FC3. Despite man documents claiming Linux fully
supports NTFS I find that FC3 reports "kernel does not support NTFS"
on a mount command. So questions 1&2:

1. Is there any way I can read/write my NTFS partition from FC3?

2. If not, is a shared VFAT partition the best alternative?

Now to the real problem. At the moment I am mounting the VFAT
partition with an entry in fstab:
/dev/hda6     /mnt/win     vfat    defaults        0 0
Heeding the many warnings on this list about newbies running as root I
tried to run as my user account accessing the shared partition (where
all of my shared workfiles are) but have no permissions because both
owner and group of all files is 'root'. I have tried chown, chgrp, (as
root) and anything else I can think of but that does not work, I
believe due to it being a VFAT drive mounted by root. I have tried all
ways I can think of to mount as a user, all give me access and
permission warnings. So the last question:

3. How do I mount the VFAT partition so that an ordinary user can
read/write to it?

I am up2date on everything and have selinux enabled, if that matters.

Thanks for any help in advance,
bob