I've assisted a friend establish a dual booting Windows/Fedora3 system and after the install, he asked me if I could resize the Linux partition from it's current 80gb ext3 to a 40gb ext3 and 40gb vfat ...

Partiton Magic "should" do what you want, it does work with ext3 not just ext2. Ive used it before to resize & move linux partitions with out any problems, so you should be fine.

Ubuntu and other Linux distributions make dual booting easy, once certain configuration issues are addressed. Dual booting requires that space be made on the hard ...