I'm trying to understand the last few hours... I installed slackware 13 yesterday in a multiboot system. On a seperate hdd from all the OS's I have my mp3 collection......I could play the mp3's as root after manually mounting sdb, but as a user I was unable to play them even though I chown'ed and chmod'ed 777 until I mounted sdb in fstab. The second drive was formatted ntfs by vista. Any idea what that was about?

If something is mounted using fstab, convention states that means the system admin (root) wants the device mounted. Then appropriate permissions are created/inherited/changed on the mountpoint. Something mounted by root manually after boot may need to be chmod'd etc. to suit.

Most new distros, not sure about slack, use some virtual file system in the users home directory to deal with external devices. I imagine in slack there is a tool to modify settings in there to allow a regular user mount and unmount an NTFS drive as required. Dunno exactly what that might be, mind! In ubuntu, running gnome, it's found at: System -> Administration -> Authorisations

That's the part that confused me, as root I mounted the drive, then chown to the user then chmod 777 for good measure. I could copy the file to my home directory and still not execute I could write to the drive as well. I just couldn't execute the files until fstab was edited and I rebooted. Just seems very weird to me.

Well, remember, you can't change linux permissions on an NTFS volume anyway, only root can execute stuff from there, for good reason!