You cannot modify a partition table if any of it's partitions are mounted.
If the system allowed that it could easily get hopelessly confused, so the partition table is locked as long as ANY partition in that table is mounted.
All of the partitions on SDA are in one partition table, of course.

Try booting from a CD (puppy or, better, system rescue CD) and don't mount anything.
You should, then, be able to modify partitions on SDA, including resizing the NTFS partition as long as the filesystem clean enough to shrink it down safely.

joe@actionline.com wrote:
>> You might try resizing back to the original size, then chkdsk, then try
>> GParted again, letting it resize the filesystem and partition together.
> 
> Tried that. It also did not work.
> In fact, by using ntfsresize back to the original size of 159G,
> it responded to say 100% complete, but now there is only 148G
> instead of the original 159G showing in sba5. Amazing.
> 
> In utter frustration, I finally just hit the DELETE button on sba5
> and it won't allow that either.  It said it couldn't do that if
> there were any mounted partitions in sba1 (which of course includes
> the Linux partitions (or file systems) that are within sba1.
> 
> Utterly incomprehensible.
> 
> 
> 
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