Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, (and here’s the key part) without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers and monitors on their desk. Run synergys (the server daemon) pointing to your configuration file on one computer. You can run it as your regular desktop user too Then run the synergyc (client daemon) on the other computer and give it the ip address of the server computer.

This lets you access your Linux home directory and local DVD drive from Windows without having to set up additional cifs/nfs mounts. My home directory is an NFS mount from another server, so you should be able to access *any* file system that is available on your Linux side.