I would avoid NTFS on thumbdrives and stick to FAT32 - yes, the 2.6 kernel supports NTFS but not every distribution turns that on (with automounting) by default and in some cases i've been damned perplexed about trying to fix that so i've generally given up.

Knoppix does do the automount, as does the latest Ubuntu.

2.4 kernels (i.e., older linux boxen) only support NTFS read-only, and may still have problems so its best avoided.

NTFS is also slow, bulky, and has lots of stuff nobody needs on a thumb drive like "Recycle Bin".