Windows NFS Mount

For many Samba is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of sharing data between a Windows and Linux machine. However Samba doesn't perform well. It seems to be because of the underlying protocol and not its implementation.

What's the alternative? NFS. A quick and dirty way to share files.Apparently Windows 7 finally has support for NFS with the 'Services for NFS' that you can install from Program and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off. But, that did seem to work well for me.
Here are the instructions if you would like to give that a shot: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/archive/2007/04/11/set-up-server-for-nfs-in-windows-server-2003-r2.aspx

I picked the Cygwin route. The installation was painless - once I uninstalled the Win7 NFS applications that didn't work from the earlier step!
Here are the instructions: http://www.csparks.com/CygwinNFS/index.xhtml
or the quick notes (once you've installed nfs for Cygwin):

• In a Cygwin Terminatl Run : /usr/bin/nfs-server-config

    ...
    Do you want to continue? (yes/no) yes
    ...
    Do you want to run nfsd under a separate user account? (yes/no) no

• Open /etc/exports and add line: /opt/imb/fw/ (ro,all_squash)

• Check listing (from remote machine showmount -e 192.168.202.199) 
• Dont forget to open your Windows Firewall ports to allow connections through!

Finally, here are the instructions to setup NFS on Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo