My external Firewire drive keeps coming up as read only after reboot.

Hello everyone,
I have a perplexing problem that just cropped up yesterday. I have an iMac (9,1) running Mac OS X 10.6.7. I've had the machine about a month now. I have an external 500GB Firewire 800 drive that holds all my iTunes music files. This was previously an internal drive in my G4MDD that I installed in an external exclosure I got from OWC. It's an EZ QUEST enclosure with an Oxford chipset. The drive is formatted Journaled HFS+, and I had reformatted it and copied all my files back over using Carbon Copy Cloner when I installed it in the enclosure. The drive is set in the Get Info window to "ignore ownership on this volume", and I have read/write permissions on the drive and the enclosing folders, including the iTunes folder. I can read the files, just not write to any directory on the drive.
Everything had been working as expected until yesterday when I started up the Mac and went to download a Podcast. The Mac informed me that it couldn't download the file because I didn't have write permissions.  I checked the drive in the Get Info window, and everything was set correctly, but I noticed that I couldn't change the ownership options, as they were grayed out.
I fixed the problem by running DiskWarrior 4.2 on it, and rebuilt the directory. After that the drive was fine; until I started up today and was faced with the same situation. I was able to fix it again in the same manner, but would like to get to the bottom of the problem. A few other bits, the drive was recently defragmented with Drive Genius 3.1, and both that and DW and Disk Utility say the volume is OK.
I've been using Macs professionally and at home since '93 and this is my 5th Mac since that time. So I know my way around them, and I'm stumped!
Any ideas?

Oh, as part of this, not sure when the change was made, OSX used to keep the mounted volume name in /Volumes, even if the volume was ejected.  Would cause an occasional problem - but very rare.  I notice now that ML seems to create/delete these mountpoints automagically - and that's part of the problem.  They get incorrect permissions when the volume mounts, and I (user I'm logged in as), can't write to the volume without some background shenanigans.
My process is this:
Unmount problem volume
Drop to terminal, and "sudo mkdir /Volumes/<mounted_volume_name>"
Remount volume via Disk Utility (you now get a "<mounted_volume_name> 1" - with CORRECT permissions)
Unmount the volume again
Remove the created directory (i.e. undo step 2)
Remount the volume - 99.9% of the time that seems to fix it.
Reboot to be sure - and it stays for a while - then at some point becomes a problem again.
Not sure if it's something in ML that's an issue - or something in iTunes or iPhoto (but can't see how they would affect the permissions when the system reboots and you login)

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