Without using ACL (I have Samba passwd configured) and bringing in folders from an NT box does anyone know of a way (without doing each folder and then the contents of the folder) to change the permissions.

If you only have a few folders deep it's not really an issue but once your folders are nested many times over with hundreds of files it's beyond my patience to follow them all out.

I have read that you can change the permission if you access the share from windows as root, but after creating a root user in the NT domain and then accessing the share and simply trying to change the permissions and read only status, it seems to take. But when I reopen it, the permissions and read only have not been saved.

Additionally, I have made entries on the share entry in smb.conf for create mask, directory mask, force create mask, etc. But these seem not to have any effect either. Thanks in advance.

Do you mean that you want to set permissions on exisitng files? Try running:
chown -R user:group /path/to/dir
chmod -R 644 /path/to/dir

Obviously change the values as appropriate.

You Sir are a Saint! I have been banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how with one or two keystrokes to change the ownership and permissions. Thank you! v