Permissions with Security in Mind

So I am becoming more concerned about security and general maintainance of my server. I have been using wordpress for awhile now and just upgraded to 1.21. I am wondering who should own all the files in wordpress. Right now they are owned by 32006. I used to log in as root and edit files but now some files are owned by root after moving them around. Should I make a wordpress user and always log in as that user to make modifications?
Also another question is php safe mode. Should I be using this and if so can someone give me the quick and dirty on who needs to own my php scripts…I may need to read up on this more and I will accept that answer as well…Thanks a lot…El