Hi, I'm wondering if there's a way to mount a remote directory over SSH without setting up NFS/samba on the server side. Preferably there's something that behaves like secure rsync (which I believe just copies portions of files on demand), but plain old scp will do. I am mainly interested in getting this running under Cygwin, but even if this can only be done on Linux, I'd be interested in knowing how.

I'm also wondering if something similar can be accomplished for Windows (so that I can browse these "mounts" in Explorer and work with them like normal files). Thanks in advance.

You should be able to do this in linux with lufs:
http://lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs/

So there's no way to do this in Windows?

I seem to remember a shareware program for windows that could map ftp directories to a drive letter - I think it was called "ftp drive" or something.