I feel I need to rectify some info in here. A FAT32 partition will not cause any problems at all on a Windows machine. All versions of Windows, including 7, have full support for the format. The problem you'll have with FAT32 is the 2GB filesize limit. If all files will be less than 2GB, you can use Disk Utility to format the drive to "MS-DOS", no problems there.
In fact, if you format your drive to NTFS on a PC and bring it over to a Mac to transfer your files, you'll discover the problem Mac OS has with NTFS: it is read-only. You will not be able to transfer your files to the NTFS drive. You can only transfer files from it.
If you need to use NTFS because of file sizes, you should use a third-party NTFS driver for Mac OS. One was listed earlier in the thread. I used Paragon's NTFS for Mac (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/). There's a free fully-functioning trial period IIRC, which is great if you only have this one project to settle. Otherwise, it's 20$ for a full license.
If you are on Snow Leopard, you can natively enable NTFS read/write with this little maneuvre (http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382). As with anything using the "sudo" command in Terminal, only attempt if you understand what you're doing.
EDIT: Even better, here's a small app that will complete the above manoeuvre easily.
http://ntfsmounter.com/
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com
