file systems... i know, fascinating stuff

So I recently got an MBP and I'd like to share an external HDD between it and a few of my Windows machines. I just bought a 500GB hard drive which I'm gonna put in an external enclosure. Would it be possible to format one 15GB or so partition in FAT32 to use as a "swap" file to transfer large files between the two different OSes?

In other words, my question is basically: can Mac OS X and Windows XP both read/write a partition formatted in FAT32? and if so, what is the max size of both the partition and files in FAT32?

thanks for your help guys!

FAT32:
OS X - read/write
Windows - read/write

NTFS
OS X - read
Windows - read/write

HFS+
OS X - read/write
Windows - Ø


Windows XP can only make maximum 32-GB FAT32 partitions.

(side note: On PCs, I get around this by reformatting first using a Windows 98 boot disk, then installing 98 then XP.)

As for the max file size, according to Wikipedia, it's 4 GB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table