pichlo, it is weirder than that, it is not actually read-only since I can write to the partition as root. I tried sudo chmod -R 777 /home/user/MyDocs but it didn't not fix the prob. Being a fat32 partition chown does nothing and fails.
Last night I ssh'd in to the N900 ran midnight commander as sudo and installed a FTP daemon on my laptop and used this acrobatic method to transfer my wifes music to the phone MyDocs where I normally just mount MyDOcs via wifi/SCP on my laptop.
(edit)Btw, I was tired and realized I had typed fdisk on my post, fortunately I had used fsck on the N900!

I know this is something with permissions but it has been ten years at least since I have had a permissions issue like this.