I have two NTFS drives mounted as win_c and win_d. Only the root user can browse into them. Other users can see them, but they appear empty.

I'm a Linux newbie--hence the posting in the Newbie forum--so I su'ed over to root and typed konqueror /mnt to get to an easy tool. I right-clicked on the win_c directory, selected Permissions, and tried to set it to let everyone show entries and enter. I also clicked the "apply changes to subdirectories" box and clicked OK.

Then it hangs forever. Over in the console window there's a message that says The library kpfpropertiesdialog does not offer an init_kpfpropertiesdialog function.

When I try it on win_d I get the same thing.

All I want is for users to be able to read (not even write!) my Windoze drives without logging in as root.

You will need to make modifications to /etc/fstab
This example will mount a partition (hda1) as read-only.
Note:
NTFS support is Read-Only.
Do NOT write to NTFS from Linux.
It may corrupt your NTFS filesystem.

Here are the lines from fstab:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat defaults,user,ro 0 0
dev/hda2 /mnt/win_d ntfs defaults,user,ro 0 0

The first drive is a fat32, the other true NTFS, so I think that's right.

Now when I log in as a regular user and do an ls /mnt/win_c I get a list of directories directly under win_c, which is right, and I also get a list of "permision denied" statements pertaining to other files under it. When I try to cd directly into win_c I get a permission denied error. I can still browse the drives as root.

So I went in as root and once again tried to set the permissions, and the whole thing hung forever just like before.

try adding umask option then remount them
so

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat rw,umask=022 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_d ntfs ro,umask=222 0 0

Note it's pretty safe to write to a fat32 partition and its useful sometimes, so might just mount it rw. With the above umask value only root can write to it.
Hope this helps

Done. Here's what I then get when I try to list files:

[javaguy@dhcp024-209-106-131 javaguy]$ ls /mnt/win_c
ls: /mnt/win_c/Amber.ico: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/arcldr.exe: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/arcsetup.exe: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/autoexec.bat: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/Autorun.inf: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/boot.ini: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/config.sys: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/io.sys: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/msdos.sys: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/ntdetect.com: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/ntldr: Permission denied
ls: /mnt/win_c/pagefile.sys: Permission denied
Documents and Settings/ nvidia/ Recycled/
j2sdk1.4.1_03/ Program Files/ winnt/


The win_d drive is still a straight permission denied.

Can you post your /etc/fstab (all of it).

/dev/hdb1 / ext2 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat defaults,user,ro,umask=222 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/win_d ntfs defaults,user,ro,umask=222 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

Can you post the output of the "mount" command by itself?
after you mounted the windows partitions that is.

For FAT32 use :

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat defaults,umask=000 0 0


For NTFS use:

/dev/hda2 /mnt/win_d ntfs auto,ro,umask=0222 0 0

Done.

Same result.