Although a standard Windows XP Professional OS cannot read (= mount) Macintosh-formatted CDs (neither hfs nor hfs+), the burning program Nero Express can duplicate such CDs!
I have a couple of scratched CDs with DivX video files. Both VLC and DivX Player were not able to play these files beyond the first corrupted frames. They tried to resume, but because the damage was too much, they did get stuck completely. But I found a player that handles most of these problems quite well: BSPlayer. It is only available for Windows though...
Network browsing in Windows is a mystery. Sometimes some computers simply don't show up when browsing a network. This seems to be especially true for Linux servers. Under newer versions of the Windows OS (2000, XP), you can connect to a server (if you know its IP adress) via the mount network drive command even though the network browser cannot see that server. Windows NT doesn't have that option. The only possibility is to use the "net use" command from the command line. This is uncomfortable, although one can make .bat files for frequently used connections.