I have samba from win dev box to my webserver, and I want to carefully set permissions for user_me on the win box to reach , read, write, execute
/usr/local/apache2/www on the server

I think? would like the ownership of the /www to NOT be root but user_me. The rest of the /usr/local/apache2/ can remain as is.
The point is to add/modify webpages to the webserver.

I'm thinking chmod -R 777 /usr/local/apache2/www. Tried it, but it doesn't seem to be working out. I tried it from /user_me prompt, probably need to do it as root? and 777 is too broad surely? Should I change ownership first? how?
Maybe a little direction here would be good.

ls - l for the directory /www now reads:
drwxr-sr-x 4 root root ...... www

thanks much,
P.Biter

is there a file named .htaccess in the /usr/local/apache2/www directory? If so try removing it or renaming it.