Hey crashnburn I wrote the article over at myriadofthings.com. If it were me and I was trying to achieve what your talking about I would use Vmware conveter to make an image of the xp box then mount the VM with vmware player on the windows 7 box. My reasoning for this is you are never leaving the vmware product family so compatibility issues, no matter how small, will not be a problem and they are both free and readily available. Vmware player also supports USB pass-through so syncing the apple products should not be an issue. The speed issues I encountered while making the image could have been a variety of things. For a true test I would have run both tests on the same network link and at separate times. Because I was testing for my own amusement it was not really an issue. As far as sharing files between the two the other posters are correct and you can use regular SMB network sharing. However in vmware player you can also set a folder from the host machine to be shared to a folder on the guest OS. If you set this to the root of C: on the host it should do exactly what you need with no networking overhead. If you do run it off of a USB you may experience some lag. I have had mixed results when it comes to useability and what exactly I was trying to do. Unfortunately as far as I know VMWare player only supports USB 3.0 under linux so that is not an option either. I hope this helps.