As part of a cleanup of someone's notebook, I created a non-admin account and copied the docs/shortcuts. Thankfully, the data was already in a separate drive. Trouble is, the non-admin user would see all of it as read-only.
I tried changing the perms on the content (via the gui as well as via attrib.exe), but the non-admin user still wasn't able to write.
It turned out that the issue was file ownership. I'm not too sure what the patchlevel of the XP system was, but a right click -> properties menu didn't bring up any tab where I could see or change file ownership.
The solution: download and install Cygwin, and then a simple "chown -R <NonAdminUser> /cygdrive/<driveletter>/*".
Reinforces my opinion that one really *needs* cygwin to make Windows usable!