Okay, I know that NTFS is readable-only if you have the support compiled in, but for some reason, I am unable to allow anyone other than root even read it. Even if I try to do something like chmod a+r /mnt/win, it complains that "chmod: changing permissions of `/mnt/win'': Read-only file system". So... Is there any way around this? Or will I just have to be root?

From man mount(8):

Mount options for ntfs       ...       uid=value, gid=value and umask=value              Set the file permission on the filesystem. By              default, the files are owned by root and not              readable by somebody else.