Dual Booting XP & LL2 with shared data partition.

[gold_finger]

Also I didn't know about the separate (2GB) root partition - thankyou for that too.

I'm sure it was just a typo on your part, but above should read "separate (2GB) /home partition", not "root".

I don't use a separate /home partition myself, but some people like to do that.  Under the circumstances here, it'll just hold your user program config files (which take up very little room), but keeping them on separate /home partition WILL make re-installs easier if you end up needing to do that somewhere down the line.