I have been struggling to setup proper filesystem sharing between my VMware XP instance and Mac. Now I could  simply just checkout the SVN projects within VMWare just fine but I want to keep all my SVN projects checked out on the Mac side for the following reasons:

I don’t want to have to install anything I absolutely need in the VMware XP install. The more I install the slower XP gets - we all know that equation.
Having SVN locally allows Time Machine to backup my files pre check in.
I no longer need XYPlorer (a great utility) installed in XP which I used to quickly search for and in my source files because Mac has this awesome feature called Spotlight

By default VMware created a default read only share to my Mac file system which does allow me read only access from XP. However, it is a little slow, is only read only, and most Windows XP applications (including Visual Studio) fail accessing it because it starts with a . and that can’t be changed.

I tried turning on Mac SMB sharing, with limited success. Access was established but I could never get the read/write permissions to stick properly. I have to admit that Unix file permissions are very weak compared to Windows. This was a long battle which I finally lost do to time and frustration.

I finally resorted to creating another share within VMware with read/write access. Then, within XP, I mapped a drive letter to the share. This eliminated the problem with Windows applications choking on the URL that started with a period.

Several blogs and news group posts reported issues with the VMware share’s reliability, but so far I have not had any issues.