All I want is a simple file server that everyone can read from and write to. Absolutely no security limitations at all whatsoever. It's just on my home network, behind 2 routers and 2 firewalls and NAT/IP Masquerading, so security is really not an issue.

However, no matter what I try, I cannot write to the public share from any user but root. What can I do to enable write capability from regular users? Also, files all show up as being owned by root, when they should be owned by samba. They are owned by samba on the actual fileserver, and the directories they are mounted to are owned by samba on the other machines. Why is it mounting them as owned by root?

Here is my smb.conf minus some printer shares.

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
server string = Samba Server %v
printcap name = cups
printing = cups
load printers = yes
security = share
browseable = yes
public = yes
browse list = yes
preferred master = yes

[public]
comment = Public Files
guest ok = yes
path = /data/public
force user = samba
force group = users
read only = No
public = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
directory security mask = 0777
writeable = yes
force create mode = 0777
force directory mode = 0777

Please help me remove all this annoying security crap!

Your network setup sounds a lot like the Charity Office example in the Samba by Example book. If you have samba-doc installed, then you already have this book:

http://localhost:901/swat/help/Samba...html#id2530241
or if you don't have swat installed:
look for this webpage at
file:///usr/share/doc/packages/samba...de/simple.html
Here is a part of the example configuration:
In this example, the forced user is "abmas" and the forced group is "office". You may want to create a new user/group to use for your share. ( I'm not sure if you want to use a system user ) The directories shared are given the owner:group "abmas:office" using the chmod command as root on the samba server. There are other things mentioned, and I don't know how close you want to be to the example. I would recommend you read the example yourself. If your system doesn't have a samba-doc package, try looking in http://rpm.pbone.net . ( For rpm based distro's )

One last thing. If you configure samba by manually editing the /etc/samba/smb.conf file yourself, be sure to run "testparm" to verify that you don't have syntax errors in the configuration file.
I copied and pasted your smb.conf segment to a file and it passed this test, However, if there is an error in a part you didn't post, this might cause the configuration to be rejected.