Sorry karavite, but I actually posted a lengthy reply to this the other day, and just before I submitted it my explorer terminated and it has taken me a couple of days to get back the motivation.
Anyway, there is a couple of ways to go.
1. If you want to connect you MAC to your PC, you can connect using either GO/ connect to server if in finder, or use the connect icon if you have added to the finder menu (in customise finder)
to do this use smb://servername/sharename. You can then enter the password etc
There is a rather major limitation though with a work around. If you cant do this, it is possible that your MAC cannot find the host by name using broadcast. The mac implementation of CIFS is very similar to the win9x one in that it will not connect via IP address. In this case, if you dont have a local name resolver like a DNS, you can add it manually by opening Netinfo on your MAC (in Applications/utilities). From there unlock it and add an entry in "machines". Just copy the localhost entry with regard to the attributes required.
2. connect your windows machine to you MAC
In this case, first turn on windows sharing in this will allow you to connect to \\macipaddress\yourloginshortname (it will tell you the share in the preference panel if in doubt.
One downfall to this is that you may want to get to other locations or disks attached to your MAC. There are many ways around this including hacking or replacing the OSX samba server. However to keep it simple and supported, there is another option.
If you add a symbolic link to the location that you want in your home directory or a subdirectory of you home directory, then transparent access to other dosks or folders is possible. To do this just open a terminal window and setup the symbolic link.
Terminal can be found in applictions/ utilities and you can run "man ln" from there to find out how to setup the link.
Do not worry if the disk in question is removable because it simply will not show up when not connected.
with regard to printer sharing, I am going to fob off to a previous forum where they gave this hints page which discusses sharing mac connected printers to windows machines. There was some positive feedback so I hope that it helps
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021101062604548
