Chip,

As far as I can tell from following all of the discussions, it is still not safe if used in the normal way one would expect to use it.

There are some people who post that it has worked fine for them. There are others who post about the awful things that happened when they tried. Do you feel lucky today?

I said when used in the normal way because there is, reportedly, some alternate driver included on the Knoppix DVD that, in theory, can safely write to NTFS. I sure still would not risk it, seems hard for me to believe that Linux can write safely to NTFS when Microsoft has proven over and over again that they can't. But these drivers are not used by default, and I think there is an issue in using them in a GUI (although that kind of conflict doesn't make much sense, which also worries me). So if you are dead set on doing this, back up all of your data and search the forums to find the secret of using that alternative driver.