Thats mostly what I figured. I had seen a few tools to read EXT stuff on windows, but most of it also comes with "oh hey, you might F up your data" warnings :pissed:
Of course they do...It's the only sane disclaimer for non-supported/commercial software. Your expectations are out-of-line with reality, it would seem.
Check out
http://www.ext2fsd.com/ and
http://ext2read.blogspot.com/It has limited ext4 support, and defaults to read-only mount for ext4 (so, in effect, zero *real* risk your data will be lost)