You don't really need a crossover partition. There is NTFS drivers for
Linux as well there is EXT drivers for Windows. The Linux NTSF drive is
not stable and thus not recommended, but the EXT driver is quite stable
and you could give your Windows XP full access read/write to Linux.
here is the home of the driver http://www.fs-driver.org/

Windows will attempt to monitor the drive and add a recycle bin folder.
You can avoid that by disabling the monitoring of only this partition
through the system monitoring tab from your system properties. Right
click on recycle bin and disable the recycle bin there too.

Also Unix security is disables when Windows is the up OS.

> You don't really need a crossover partition. There is NTFS drivers for
> Linux as well there is EXT drivers for Windows. The Linux NTSF drive is
> not stable and thus not recommended, but the EXT driver is quite stable
> and you could give your Windows XP full access read/write to Linux.
> here is the home of the driver http://www.fs-driver.org/

I found that I can access my NTFS drive from Kubuntu -- but I'm a little bit
afraid to do it. I've heard you can foul up the whole drive that way and
have to start over with Fdisk.

> Windows will attempt to monitor the drive and add a recycle bin folder.
> You can avoid that by disabling the monitoring of only this partition
> through the system monitoring tab from your system properties. Right
> click on recycle bin and disable the recycle bin there too.

Thanks for the info. At this point, I'm still a bit undecided what to do.
Have to consider all of it for a while.

I access my ntfs drive all the time for programs I want to install with
wine, I've never had 1 problem.

did you actually write to NTFS from Linux? Does it preserve
NTFS security? Could you modify Windows system folders like (renaming
"Documents and Settings" into "Users" or "home")?
How long you have used for?
I keep most my data in the NTFS partition, and I am very hesitated to
write to it from Linux. I know the driver is not stable but sometimes
that just means "one time error every 5 years" or "one error every 10
access times". I am not sure where to put the linux NTFS driver! Where
do you think it would lie?

The only thing I used it for was to transfer windows programs into my
wine directory for installation.

I've just been accessing my Windows disk!

You should have a directory at the root level called mnt. This is
usually empty, and called the mount point.

To mount your Windows disk, open a terminal, and type -

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt (assuming the desired partition is hda1)

Then if you change directory to mnt, ie. type cd /mnt you should be
able to see the contents of your Windows disk, move around the Windows
disk, and copy files into Linux.