I don't think I will ever get this shit to work on new linux installs.

I am setting up Samba again. I want to log in at the windows machine with a user who is part of the root group, but I am doing all the permission changing logged in as root. I am mounting my fat32 volume at /home/%USER%/WindowsShare. I tried running chmod on the directory before and after it was mounted, logged in as root. First, with the volume unmounted I would cd into the "USER" directory, then5 run "chmod 777 ./WindowsShare", then ls -l and it tells me that owner (root) has full read/write/execute permissions, but group and everyone just has read and execute. I then mount the volume and again, try changing permissions to 777 and again, comes up "rwxr-xr-x". I can't even change ownership of the directory to "%USER% which I think would solve the problem. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong? I want the directory to have full read/write/execute for everyone.

You can't use chmod on a FAT device, because that file system simply doesn't support *nix file permissions. The only thing you can do is simulate them during mounting. Take a look at the smb.conf 'create mask' and 'directory mask' options to set the permissions you want. There's also an 'inherit permissions' option that will give files the permissions of the parent directory. read man smb.conf(5) for more.