jcl -
These other brave souls know more about partitioning the device. As I've said, I used ClockworkMod on my phone to do it. That said, I see no immediate reason why your partitioning setup shouldn't work. Remember: the key step is that you have to get the Link2SD app to recognize the ext3 partition. Once you've swapped the two fstab files with the ones I uploaded, try dropping the install-recovery.sh into the /etc directory. Then, reboot and make sure things have loaded up before you jump into the Link2SD program.
Personally, I have trouble believing that the order in which you partition the card actually makes a difference. However, people here seem to have formatted the entire card as FAT32 and then added the EXT3 partition.
One final thing - the files have definitely been modified. You just need to remove the *.txt tags, which I put on there simply because the MobileRead forum required it.
Good luck! Report back how it goes!