I've got QEMU 0.8 (i386 binaries provides from QEMU homepage), and I need to be able to browse the local subnet with it (XP Professional is my guest/emulated OS), but I can't seem to get it working.

I can do user-net, and get onto the Internet, but that doesn't give me access to the local subnet.

I did 'modprobe tun' and then granted everyone read and write permissions to /dev/net/tun.

However, when I fire up QEMU (using the -net nic,tap params), it says tun0 does not exist. I'm a bit lost!

I have read many howto's, and they are very cryptic to me. One suggests installing openvpn and configuring some stuff... I'm unsure as how to proceed.

My plans are to bridge the tun0 interface with eth0.

What do I need to do?

Most people use vmware to run two OSes simultaneously on one machine. You might want to look into that. There are certainly more people who would be familiar with vmware than with qemu.