Help setting permissions on a thumb drive

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

I have a 4GB thumb drive that I have formatted with two
partitions: 

#1 is 100MB with vfat format
#2 is all the rest with ext4 format

I want to set permissions so that I can read/write on partition #1 on
both my Squeeze computer and on a Windows box, both as a
non-privileged user.  The last time that I ever had any real contact
with Windows was in the early days of Windows95, back in the last
century. I know that back then there was not much that one could do to
make this data interchange 'user friendly'. Has anything changed? Or
do I still have to use root to write on a vfat partition? I wouldn't even
bother to ask except I read in man-pages, for things related to mount,
that a distinction is sometimes made among 'user', 'users', and the
'owner of the device'.  So, I think maybe some software has been written
to clean up this mess, but probably not. So, has there been
improvement?

On the other hand, I have no problem with partition #2. It behaves as it 
should under Squeeze, and Windows does not give any hint that it knows of
its existence, Which is OK for me. 

But I would like to have a better way to move data on and off the vfat
partition, if such a way actually exists.

Ideas? Information?
TIA

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net