Thanks for your replies gents. It seems reliability is not fully guaranteed unless one runs under 2.6.20+ with fuse 2.6.9+. Etch fulfils neither requirement. Apt-cache tells me I could install 2.6.21 (probably thanks to etch-backports). Do you think the kernel upgrade would take care of fuse, and then I'd only need to compile ntfs-3g from source? --bald