FAT32 problems with kernel 2.4.19

(I'm forwarding this from comp.os.linux.help - I'm having the same issue
with FAT32)

hey all,

I have a removable, USB disk (ikebana) that I'm trying to use as a
portable storage device (ie: developing programs for Win32, macosx and linux
simultaneously)

Anyways, everything is sort of working except for execute privileges
on linux (win32 works, macosx works). When I try to execute something, I get:

bash-: ./a.out: Permission Denied

When I try to execute a shell script (even as root), I get:

-bash: ./aa.sh: /bin/bash: bad interpreter: Permission denied

Now, I understand that FAT32 has no execute bit.. however I explicitly set
(or an automatic process on SuSe linux set the fstab entry for the drive
to be:

/dev/sda1            /windows/D           vfat
users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=iso8859-1,code=437 0 0

which as I understand it sets the permissions to be 775.

Argh! so I would expect this to work transparently.

So... is there a bug in the kernel, default settings, is something
missing in the above entries, or what? I'll escalate this to
linux-devel if it looks like there is nothing wrong with the above..

forgot to mention -

When I'm writing to FAT32 partition, there seems to be a 300% incurred
size penalty over the equivalent files on ext2 (when unpacking a
source distribution like boost, gcc, etc)

Is this an artifact of the FAT32 file system, a bug in the linux IO to
the FAT32 file system, or a local bug in my system?

I'd like to get this resolved, but understand if its a microsoft
issue...
however it would be really, really nice if NTFS was supported (ie: if
linux could write files on NTFS..) I have a sneaky suspicion that
FAT32 isn't the greatest and only used on these drives because it is
the lowest common denominator.

jon