Microsoft Vista and misbehaving NTFS USB hard drive

[sandbender]

My father in law has a laptop running Vista, his off board (LaCie) USB hard drive (NTFS) allows him to write to the disk, delete from the disk but he cannot edit files or photographs while they are on the disk!

A bit of jiggery pokery on an Ubuntu machine now allows me to modify files on the drive but still he cannot.

Any thoughts, ideas from the technically minded would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.