Please excuse what may be a stupid question...

When I upload a file Drupal first puts it in the files/tmp folder. My server sets this file's User and Group to Apache. It also sets the permissions to rw-rw-r--. This causes havoc with the media module and any attempts to upload a module update.

Does anyone else run into this problem?

I got around some ownership and permission problems for Image directories by stepping through numerous chown commands and changing the permissions (PITA). But that work around is not feasible with the media and module update files into tmp. It simply errors out or crashes as it attempts to perform the processes on the file.

Thanks in advance for any help!