Comment 2 for bug 1087915

"At the moment, it seems that mount.ntfs-3g disables -o permissions if -o uid=UUU and/or uid=GGG are also specified."
Yes, that should be expected. You cannot both define the owner of a file both as the current user and a forced user. See http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/ownership-and-permissions/#options
"This (combined with Ubuntu's compilation options disallowing user mounts for NTFS-3g) prevents unprivileged users from easily accessing NTFS systems while preserving standard Unix permissions."
This is unrelated. For preserving standard permissions, do not force owner and group which would be a non-standard way of setting permissions.
"With "mount -o permissions", permissions ARE preserved, but all files are owned by root:"
No, should not be. You are probably displaying files not created with option "-o permissions" or files created by root, or files created by Windows. Using "-o permissions" without forcing uid and gid, and not running as root, please post the output of :
id
touch newfile
stat newfile
"root# touch /vol/exthd/x
root# ls -al /vol/exthd/x
-rw--w--w- 1 root root 0 Dec 8 00:29 /vol/exthd/x"
The file x is created by root, it should obviously be owned by root.