Permissions for mounted drives

After doing hd-install, there is no longer any icon for windows partition-fine.
I created a /win directory and chmod 755 for it. I vi'd /etc/fstab to read:
/dev/hda1 /win vfat defaults 0 0
When the system boots up and /dev/hda1 is mounted, group and other permissions revert to read only. When I umount the windows partition, the changes I made earlier to allow r-x for group and others is back!?! When I remount, the permissions change back to r-- for group and others! I've done this in vt and in kde gui and it still does the same things.
I've modified the /etc/fstab every which way I can think of
/dev/hda1 /win vfat auto,user,rw,exec 0 0 ---- no joy
/dev/hda1 /win vfat defaults,rw,exec 0 0 ------no joy
Is there something screwy w/ mount command that only allows mounted filesystems to be accessed by root only- even though root assigns permissions to other users? I'm pulling my hair out on this one. Otherwise I really love this distro.

After some digging on this forum I found a solution:
edit /etc/fstab to include the following
/dev/hda1 /win vfat defaults,umask=0 0 0
group and others now have rwx permissions.

Thanks to newiaqua in Bulgaria for your earlier post.

thx a lot! i was having problems with this one too!!!