There are better solutions (that work faster for me) then shared folders (PSF.)
I run OS X / XP all day at work everyday and have to connect to a company domain. I've found a way to get both OS X and XP to connect & register on the Windows 2003 Server network domain. In doing so, I've also been able to map a network drive in Windows to OS X. Now this doesn't solve the issue of OS X to Windows file transfers (well, you can do it over the domain; but if you're not on the domain you can't, such as at home.) So for that, I've come to love the drag & drop of the new beta.
So I've got two monitors going, OS X / XP, both operating systems on the company domain, both sharing their entire hard drives, with XP having a mapped network drive to my OS X side (this is done by setting up Windows Sharing in OS X, assigning a name in that Sharing preference pane, and then in Windows you install Bonjour for Windows from Apple. Now in Windows you can access your Windows Share from OS X with an address through explorer like so: \\themoon.local\alex where "themoon" is the name i specified in the Sharing prefPane, .local is the loopback connection for internally connected computers, and \alex is the folder I have shared (my home folder.)
In order to get the domain thing working, I had to manually specify the internal domain DNS server in OS X (which windows found automatically afterwards through Shared Networking.. wasn't expecting that, but it sure is nice!)