Accessing virtual machine files on a ntfs partition

All I need is to be able to run a VMware virtual machine that's stored on a windows partition.  I'm dual-booting Ubuntu 6.10 and Vista and unfortunately the drivers to access ext3 filesystems don't work in Vista so my only recourse right now is to store those files on the windows drive.  Now I can read and write to ntfs drives from Ubuntu so it wasn't hard to get the files to that drive but every time I try to boot that virtual pc using Vmware Server in Ubuntu it just doesn't work. I have tried modifying the file permissions but they remain unchanged. I can't move the files to a fat32 partition so I'm kinda stuck now. Any ideas as to how I might try to change those file permissions or some other solution?