Herc
A couple of things..... you CAN'T connect 2 ethernet cards together for a PC-PC connection without what's called a "crossover cable".
You CAN connect the 2 PC's with a crossover cable (it reverses the data RX/TX wires) so you don't need a network hub.
USB hubs are great, but you really don't want 2 machines sharing the same hub. It's to do with the way that the host PC allocates resources to the devices on the USB chain.
Maybe the best solution is to network the machines together, and have share your printers / scanners etc where appropriate.
1) Get the crossover cable and connect the 2 ethernet cards together. (or if you can't get one then just buy a small 2-4 port ethernet hub from PC World).
2) Go into the network settings (control panel > network) and click TCP/IP for your network cards. If you haven't installed TCP/IP now is a good time to do it! You will also need "file and printer sharing" installed.
3) On each PC give yourself a different IP address and enter that under the IP address section. I would use 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 .
4) Just under the IP address section enter the subnet mask which in this case is 255.255.255.0. No need to enter a default gateway.
5) Click OK, and restart.
6) Make sure each machine has a different host name ( ie call one machine Herc and the other Mary or whatever!). You can change this name by right-clicking on My Computer and then selecting Properties. Then click "Network Identification" then "properties". You can input a new host name there.
You may need to restart your machines again at this point.
Then you can start sharing things. Right click your C drive in My computer, then click "sharing". Click New Share, give it a name (eg Herc's C drive). Then if you click "permissions" you will see who has permission to use it. It'll possibly be set to everyone, full control. You might just want to take that off and just put your own username in the box with full control. You do a similar thing with the other PC.
If you OK all of this, you can then (hopefully) see each other's PC's in "My Network Places" on the desktop. You have to be logged in as the user that you gave full access permission to, if not, make sure you enter it into the "connect as" box.
Same sort of thing goes with your printer etc.
It's not quite so easy with WRITE access to a CDRW, but sharing one for reading is easy. Just find it in My Computer, then right click and share again.
Hope this helps,
GE