For some if my Windows testing VMware, sadly, won't do the job. For example, I can't get my USB webcam's to work on an XP guest running on VMware on my Ubuntu machine. For testing these things I have to use my laptop. Unfortunately that requires copying files over. So I wanted to share my Ubuntu files with my laptop.

It took a while and I tried many things but I think this is the combination that did the trick.

In Synaptic, install samba.

At the command prompt, run

 sudo smbpasswd -a yourid

give it your password and the password you want to use from the windows machine.

Now on the windows machine you should be able to connect. You may need to use the numeric IP address of the host.