I use Acronis for resizing partitions - works very well.
On a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine best bet is to keep your data on a FAT32 partition which is the only format that both OSes can read/write reliably.
Linux can't write NTFS reliably because Microsoft won't publish the details of the partition format. Linux can read NTFS OK, but writing is still experimental.
Windows can't natively read or write ext2, ext3 or Reiser file systems fulls stop. This is a political decision on MS part - they don't want to encourage dual boot systems. One would have thought that hackers would have long ago written stable 3rd party installable file system drivers for these sytems, but although these filesystem specifications are public, Microsoft's proprietary OS makes it very difficult to write reliable IFS drivers.
I use ReiserFS for my Linux installs so I'm out of luck, but there is an ext2/3 driver for Windows at
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
Happy Christamas all!
Mac
PS: Over a network it doesn't matter. One can either use Samba on Linux to access Microsoft's SMB exports (best solutions) or install Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) and export as NFS which Linux reads without problems.