If I want to have RHL available on my PC along with windows XP what is the easiest way to go for a first time installer of RHL:
1) Dual boot off one partioned disc
2) Have two seperate discs drives one XP one RHL
Andy

If you already have XP installed, adding a second disk for RHL (or anything else) would save you from needing to resize your XP partition (which probably is taking up the whole disk). Its probably not that much easier these days (I think most installers will do the resize for you but I don't know for sure about RH), but resizing always carries a small risk of screwing something up.

Once I have insatlled RH how easy is it to share files between the RH side and the windows side. For example in RH I create some images from screen shots and want to make a power point presentation in the windows side. Do I have to save all the images on a RH drive shut down RH and start Windows and import the images in to Windows PPT?
Can I have both systems operating at once and just jump from on to another?
Andy

Uner a normal dual boot scenario you can only have one or the other OS operating at any given time, but you can shut one down and boot the other. I believe you can have both OSs operating at the same time using Xen, vmware, or some other virtualization technology, but I have no experience with this.

By default, XP uses NTFS for its file system. Linux can read NTFS but historically it has had its problems with writing to NTFS because this fs is proprietary as well as somewhat of a moving target. One solution for this is captive NTFS which utilizes MS's own drivers (from your XP install) to do the writing. It is also possible that the newer 2.6 kernels have solved this problem. I don't have details, so you would need to do a web search about this stuff.

Another approach (which I would probably use) would be in addition to your XP partition(s) and Linux partition(s), to create a FAT32 partition for moving data between the two OSes. Both Linux and XP can read and write FAT32 w/o problems. I think you could easily create such a partition with parted (or Qtparted or Gparted). You could also leave some unallocated space for the partition and create the partition and format it from XP.

As noted above, unless you use virtualization, you will still have to shut one OS down before starting the other.

As far as PPT goes, you should be able to use OpenOffice.org (OOo) for this. (Again, I have no experience with PPT.) OOo almost certainly comes with RH.