I have been unexpectedly busy this weekend and haven't been able to work on the laptop. I just had another thought.
Is there any way I can put /home or some major data partition on an NTFS formatted volume, so I can access files stored in /home regardless of what OS I'm currently using?
The primary thing I'm going to be sharing with Windows are Word documents and Virtual Machines, along with Firefox bookmark files. Letting Windows access where I'm storing the data directly would be most convenient, although I'm probably just going to use SAMBA or a flash drive most of the time for the non-virtual machine stuff, and i'm probably going to use a USB hard drive for the virtual machines, I'd like to cover my bases.

I probably need NTFS and not FAT32.

You can't put /home on NTFS because NTFS is too simplistic to handle the permissions and bits used on Linux files, but you could certainly mount an NTFS volume under Linux and save some of your work there. You could even mount it under /home, something like /home/username/shared_dir.

I think it could be done with colinux or maybe even the old zipslack umdos but not a common distro.

VM's could share a directory but you'd have to boot the vm since you can't access the virtual hard drive that I know of cold.

Might be a way to mirror what you want and rsync is each time.

You could also put /home on ext3 and access it from Windows with ext2fs. Just make sure your ext3 is formatted with the old standard 128 byte inodes not 256 as has been the case in the last 1-2 years.

why not store all those data genuinely from the ntfs drive (including virtual machines , but you have to make them fixed , because i've had problems with them under linux if they're not fixed size.

and make the /home partition smaller so that the ntfs has all the space ...

windows can't use ext3 , not mentioning ext4 and linux can use ntfs very well .so why bother making windows see ext partitions ...

Not true, ext2fs, a free installable driver enables just that.