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What do you mean by default is writable? Perhaps the Everyone group is set to writable, but this does not mean everyone is able to write. This is because the deny permission attribute always overide everything else in Windows. For instance, if user1 has the deny write attribute set in the NTFS permissions for folderX, yet the Everyone group which user1 is a member of has the allow write attribute set, then the effective permission is going to be that user1 cannot write to folderX as the deny attribute overides all other permissions set at any level.
If the permissions in Apache work anything like IIS (which I say they would), then you'll have two levels of permissions. You'll have the Apache permissions as you've shown above which work at the web server level. But then you'll also have the NTFS permissions which work at the file system level. You MUST have both of these sets of permissions set correctly to get any action. I'd also expect that at some point you have to configure Apache to use an account for which it will use to access the files on your HDD? You'll need to ensure the NTFS permissons set for this account are correct. Security policies may come into it too, but on a vanilla install of windows I'd doubt it.
Xoops 2.0.9 beta is the only version to date written for PHP5 compatability, and is still in beta. However, I haven't run PHP5 yet myself, even in testing environments as I don't see the need just yet as all my prodection environments are using 4.3.8 .
Still, I'd be willing to bet this is an Apache/NTFS/User account issue over everything else.