Advice on file sharing between XP guest (VirtualBox) & 11.1

Hi,

I have installed XP in VirtualBox on my KDE4.2 11.1, which works pretty fine except for the folder sharing, which is very slow. I need XP because there is some modeling software I will have to run that is Windoze only, plus I need to check formatting for OpenOffice documents I am sharing with people. I thought a virtual windows machine would be the best way to handle this.

The problem is, I was hoping to run the windows virtual machine primarily accessing the linux file system for storage, etc. Folder looks too slow, and I have tried tweaking it to no effect e.g. modifying \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts by appending additional terms (in bold):

127.0.0.1 localhost vboxsvr my_hostname

I was wondering two things, for which I would appreciate advice:

  1. Are there are methods for getting a “normal” speed of folder/file sharing between guest and host (i.e. the typical speed one would expect within the operating system)? Would Samba be any faster?

  2. If not, is it possible to use something like Ext2IFS in XP to read and write to the host file system? I am guessing no, since I have never heard any glimmer of this mentioned (except for accessing between dual-boot XP-linux systems), but thought I would check up on it.

Thanks in advance for any advice.