For XP/Vista. I'm in a situation at the moment where I need to shift a lot of data between myself and a mate I'm working on a project with (ghost images of a project PC take up a LOT of space) and I'm sick to death of zipping & splitting big files & putting them on rapidshare.
I want to try and set up a VPN (preferrably with decent encryption) between us so we can just nominate a shared folder on our PCs and dump in whatever stuff we need to transfer.
I'd also like to use it for sending stuff to my family so it has to be pretty damn simple for my sister to follow it
Any suggestions?

My father keeps asking for something exactly like this as well, so I'm also very interested.

Hamachi is great. And for some time now the premium service is free for home users.

I don't think this falls into the "pretty damn simple" category, but your work with your mate might benefit from using a darknet like WASTE.
It's highly, highly secure, has file / directory sharing capabilities, and could be useful with its chat functionality too.
It does require tinkering with port forwarding / firewalls (the original version used to send data over port 1337), though, so you may find it won't work very well away from home.

Hahaha nice port number. Shall keep this bookmarked and see if I can use it in my networking project, it'll be a bit more complex and thats one thing the project desperately needs or we'd get the damn thing finished in an afternoon, won't get good marks on that
Its not like YOU need more rep but after a bit of fiddling it seems to be doing MOST of what I need. I was hoping there'd be file sharing built into the app so I didn't have to expose all my windows shares but it should be obscure enough to be safe. Cheers

No one can ever have enough rep, it makes me cool doesn't it? Repspect!
If you trust the guy your working with it shouldn't be a problem shareing folders, if not you can always unshare folders you don't want him to see while running hamachi. It also works really well for playing older games or heavily modded games that you can't take on the net.

Yeah but I don't really need people being able to look through my half terabyte of porn. I mean they all know I'm a sad pathetic wanker but they don't need to see everything...
Messing with the shares is the exact reason I was hoping the app could do custom shares so it would only share what I wanted when the program was running. No real drama though, not like I'll be allowing anyone random to connect
Can Hamachi emulate IPX (and any other weird archaic protocols) networking or is it just IP?
I think you're leading in rep now, shows what happens when I stop trolling for questions to answer.

Well hamachi will only share folders that would normally be seen on a LAN from allowing access via explorer. So your half terabyte of porn should be safe unless you have the folder on shared status.
Not sure about emulating IPX, I don't think it does but I haven't tryed playing any games old enough to need an IPX connection. I would need to find some friends that were still into older games to do that.
I've unfortunatly been able to do nothing but spend way to much time trolling through internet forums recently.

I actually have the root of the drive shared, since its my main file storage, I move things to and from it all the time and its a lot easier to set up a single master share rather than a half dozen individual ones. Might have to play with the permissions on it though to make sure that the everyone group can't delete anything
Not sure about emulating IPX, I don't think it does but I haven't tryed playing any games old enough to need an IPX connection. I would need to find some friends that were still into older games to do that.
Didn't C&C1 use IPX for LAN? I never had a network card back then (damn imagine a computer without a NIC these days!) so I was only able to play it over dialup which usually got screwed up when someone phoned

Hamachi doesn't emulate anything except a network adapter - any protocols you can run on a physical adapter can be run through hamachi (thus, as long as you have IPX installed, you can run IPX games).
There was another piece of software that (among other things) acts as a IPX-over-IP tunnel, but I can't remember the name now (though I remember I never liked it much), IIRC it's still being developed.

Either that or set up a single shared folder, and use symbolic links (or junctions in NTFS terms) to link to the other folders.
On Windows XP you can use the command-line tool Junction (from Sysinternals, which is now part of Microsoft), for Vista and 7 use the command "mklink /J <linkname> <where it should point to>".