Can anyone please point me in the direction of a useful (easily understood) reference telling me how to network one computer running SuSE 8.1 to another running Windows XP? At the moment both machines are happily sharing an internet connection through an ADSL router, but I need a simple tutorial to tell me how to set them up to communicate with each other.
Many thanks.

For a simple peer-to-peer:

on Windows box, set up a shared directory or disk:
right click a dir or disk and enable sharing
add a user from your linux box

on Linux box:
install samba and maybe samba-swat (web browser configurer for samba) if youre a newbie
configure your shared dir's and/or disks from Swat

if you're not using a hub, use a crossover cable for this... make sure you have dhcp running... preferably on the linux box (Windows boxes are horrible for networking IMHO)

I have Pentium III VAIO running Win XP and AMD Athlon rig running SuSE 8.1 with external ADSL modem and a personal router.

Definitely you need samba but most likely installed by default. You just need to activate it. Use YaST or do it manually because most likely you dont have samba-swat just like me :-(

Don't worry: install LinNeighborhood! This will be easy. Workgrup =workgroup ;-)

Just need your ip configured properly for samba's smbclient, nmblookup, smbmount, etc. (e.g. 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0). Ditto for server.

Don't forget to configure your firewall on both sides after configuring the shared folder(s). Otherwise they wouldn't talk.

I can brows and copy stuff from linux box but since XP is in NTFS I cannot write and vise-versa ;-)

Have alot of fun!

you should be able to write to a linux disk from an xp box...

Here's a step by step receipe for success with Samba:

Samba how to