There is another implementation of ext2 through the Installable FileSystem Kit, called http://www.fs-driver.org/]ext2ifs. It has been in development for several years, and has working ext2 write support - but I never played with it for long enough to notice any bugs that might exist.

The application is meant for accessing physical partitions, and I must admit that I don't know to go about mounting harddisk images in windows. Is it perhaps possible to use it together with something like Daemon Tools?

Might I also ask why you need to use ext2 images in windows? Unless you're specifically after a file system with UNIX permissions, you could use e.g. fat32, which has perfect support for read/write operations on all modern platforms.

I'd install linux in a virtual machine under Windows, create a samba share that Windows can access, create a mount point in the share for the image file, and then mount the image file on that mount point. Windows will then be able to access the image file with read/write permissions just fine. I do this when necessary myself and it works without problems.

Well, in truth, writing file system drivers in Windoze is a REAL PITA compared to Linux. When MS is doing everything it can to suppress Linux adoption, why should Linux developers waste their time in giving Windows easy access to Linux devices? I've pretty much completely stopped doing Windows system development because it is costly (have you seen what an MSDN license costs these days?), doesn't pay much because of all the out-sourcing of Windows application development to India and China, and Microsoft keeps changing the rules (api's, EULA terms, etc). So, as a professional, I say screw that! At least if a linux driver that a client requires has problems, I can usually get the source code and fix it myself if the vendor isn't forthcoming with a fix in a timely manner.