I was wondering which distro handles setting up dual booting the best. I have read some articles and done some searching but I would like all of your opinions/information. This will be on a laptop that already has WinXP on a single ntfs partition (still need windows for some work and school related), so I will need the distro to be able to resize the windows partition as I dont really want to format the whole drive. I have been running DSL on an old desktop for a while so I have a little Linux experience but none with dual booting so I prefer a distro that will be fairly straight forward for setting up this dual boot. Any help would be appreciated.

I suggest Suse or Mandriva. Their installers are very good at resizing Windows and creating space for Linux without any data loss.

Recently installed Debian Sarg on a setup very simmilar to yours, except Win98. Used 'fips', a dos or windows program, to losslesly split the windows partition. It, the Debian installer, installed Grub - the grand unified boot loader - to dual boot automatically and painlessly.