I have just installed Ubuntu on my Dell D610. Even though I am the
only user and sign in as Administrator, when I go to System - Drives -
Partition and enable Partition 1 ( Windows XP) I am not allowed to
look at what is on Partition 1. Seems strange to me as I am the only
user. I have tried every trick I can think of with no luck. Also, once
I shut down and sign on again the partition is no longer Enabled. Is
there a trick to this?

For what I am using Linux for - EMC - it is important for me to
be able to easily pull g-code files into Ubuntu from XP ( my CAD
system only works in Windows) to use in EMC. As I am new to Linux
could someone please tell me how to achieve this in a straight
forward simple minded step by step way. Please assume that I know
nothing about Linux.

Also, it seems that my Admin privileges time out very quickly.
Is there a way to increase this time? make it infinite maybe?

I am mystified as to what you are trying to do and what the problem is.You do
not mount drives from the partition manager. You only use this
if you are modifying a drive or partition. mounting is done through
Nautilus.

In Ubuntu, you never log in as Administrator. You log in as a user. To gain
Admin privileges you use sudo at a command prompt. To get admin privileges with
Nautilus the file manager, you can type sudo nautilus in a terminal. Keep that
terminal session open or you lose Nautilus. Now you can browse with full admin
privileges. Just be aware of the inherent danger.

The reason why you can't do this normally is for your protection. Let's say
someone wanted to delete something in their root directory they would be able to
do it, but this can have grave consequences. It can be akin to editing the
registry in Windows. You need to know what you are doing or you can mess up your
installation.

However, to access a Windows partition you don't need to do this. You can do it
as a user. You simply open Nautilus as usual and if you try to access Windows it
will ask you for your password the first time it is opened in a session.
Thereafter you don't need the password. The use of a password is relatively new.
You did not need to do it in the past.

To mount a drive open Nautilus. Look in the drive tree on the left for
the drive you want. Click on it. It will either open the drive, as for
a password before it opens it or refuse to open it. If it is the
latter, then you may have to re-boot tofix the problem. This is
unlikely unless there is something wrong with the drive (not shut down
properly for example) or you have made changes in the partition manager.

However, if Windows did not shut down normally or if it has been mounted without
checking a certain number of times this is logged and it may shut you out until
you boot into Windows and shut it down properly. When you re-boot Linux it may
take a lot longer sometimes. This is because it is doing consistency checks on
drives that have been mounted more than a certain number of times.