Make Brooks' statement "The only reason to use FAT is if you are going to do some sort of dual boot with NT 4 and a version of win 9.x before Windows 95 OSR2." since that's when they introduced it. FAT32 is compatible with W95 OSR2, W98, and WME.
I have to admit that I was really carefull to wait and see what happened with FAT32 before implementing it myself, but I've never experienced any problems with it unless it was used on a drive with a proprietairy overlay. I recently made the switch to XP and I have to say that I wish I'd gone FAT32, simply because all of the low-level utilities I've acquired over the years won't work on NTFS - and even some of my more recent programs. For instance: Ghost is out unless you upgrade to Ghost 2002, Partition Magic is out unless you upgrade to v7. I haven't had to try AMI Diag or any of my other DOS based diagnostic utilities but I suppose the ones that load into RAM will work fine except for hard drive testing.
By the way, the reason for problems with even the last release of Partition Magic and Ghost are apparently due to the fact that XP uses what I found referred to as "NTFS3" that is different from the NTFS that was used with W2K and NT.