Thank you folks for your responses. Those give me some options. I should have also mentioned that I have an iMac with SL, if that opens up any options.
Today I tried to set permissions on my wifes mac mini HD (Snow Leopard) to be read and write accessible to everyone and clicked the option for it to apply to enclosed items, after which I got the horizontal barber poll, and after about 15 minutes got a pop-up alert that something wasnt...