Thanks for the reply.

Fstab:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/hda vfat rw

/mnt/hda is owned by user and grouped by users

The drive mounts as before (with less typing by me ) but is still read only to the file manager (it's rw to command line). Perhaps I have something wrong in that fstab statement? Maybe I'm wrong and the file manager isn't runing as "User"?

Thanks again for your help
Jim