Interacting with windoze machines on the local network

[Leonard Zettel]

I have a local ethernet network with:
One FreeBSD box
One Windows XP professional box
Two Windows ME boxes (one of which is the inernet firewall, using
Sygate)..

I would like to be able to access the hardware and file systems
of the windows boxes from the FreeBSD system, if for no other 
reason than expediting the task of making the FreeBSD system
my main computing resource..

Is Samba still the recommended way to do this?

Is Mickeysquish's phasing out of NETBUI going to be
a problem?

Are there any other reasonable alternatives?
  -LenZ-