Interesting, and confirms my campaign for new Linux users to stay far away from Ubuntu and its variants; it simply has too many bugs that will drive you crazy, and it's been that way for years! Not sure what "usb-creator" is. Is that a program of some sort? I could be wrong, but the user seems to be confused about the way Linux handles various filesystems.
FAT32 and FAT16 don't have a native permission structure per se so Linux grafts one on it in order to make vfat compatible with Linux. With vfat, you change access permissions by changing the "umask" option in the fstab entry for the vfat partition. You can't use chmod or chown on a vfat filesystem since it has no native permission structure, only an emulated one created by the Linux kernel for compatibility reasons. If you try to chmod or chown a vfat filesystem -- even as root -- you will get a "permission denied" error message.
Native Linux filesystems like ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, etc, have native support for Linux file permissions built into the filesystem. You change the permissions on a partition with a Linux filesystem by running chmod or chown on the partition mount point while the partition is mounted. It will not work if you run those commands while the partition is not mounted. If (or rather why) Ubuntu can't do this is beyond me.
