You don't really need a crossover partition. There is NTFS drivers for
Linux as well there is EXT drivers for Windows. The Linux NTSF drive is
not stable and thus not recommended, but the EXT driver is quite stable
and you could give your Windows XP full access read/write to Linux.
here is the home of the driver http://www.fs-driver.org/

Windows will attempt to monitor the drive and add a recycle bin folder.
You can avoid that by disabling the monitoring of only this partition
through the system monitoring tab from your system properties. Right
click on recycle bin and disable the recycle bin there too.

Also Unix security is disables when Windows is the up OS.