Here is the situation:

I have a laptop hard drive here which has HPFS/NTFS fs.
Also have the hard drive that i'd like to copy the files/folders from the laptop hard drive over to which is vfat filesystem.

Now i've never come across this problem before but in my gui when i'm looking at the ntfs laptop drive which was mounted obviously ro in the fstab the user folder that I need to copy shows up as a file with a lock on it. When I try to click it I get this message:
You do not have enough permissions to read file:/mnt/hdc1/Documents and Settings/The File

Alright, this is a windows xp hard drive where i'm trying to get to the my documents folder of the user The File. But the permissions are obviously locked up.

How would I go about getting this over to my vfat drive and clearing the permissions so I can then view it as a directory? Or, what do you think is the correct way to get this to work for me?

I've tried
Setting up the captive-ntfs and mounting like so:
mount -t captive-ntfs /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 -o rw,users,uid=000
And the output of this action was receiving this error: ls: .:Stale NFS file handle

So we see there is also a problem with mounting it as captive-ntfs.

Is there something I should do with dd?

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank You

Try something different:
mount -t captive-ntfs /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1 -o rw,users,umask=0
You probably have the default setting for mounted filesystem configured in such a way that only owner (root) can access (both read and write) the device. Umask parameter changes the default and should allow other users to read the disk.