whats up, first thing is first and you need to enable SMB on your Mac. Windows uses SMB for all networking and Mac uses the open source version called Samba.
So on your mac go to system preferences > sharing > and make sure windows file sharing is checked. On top of that you must enable an account because SMB requires authentication.
Now you should be able to simply do a \\ip.of.the.mac in any explorer window to pull it up.
A great free open source utility for file sharing on the mac is called share points, it will automatically configure the smb.conf file for you.
you can get it here:
http://www.hornware.com/
Now in sharepoints (the app i linked above) you can assign the mac to a workgroup which should allow you to browse over the network browser.
As for monitoring network traffic, littlesnitch is a good one and there is a plethora of *nix ports on the mac which IMO are better than most of the windows based ones.
If you have any further mac questions this particular forum is geared more towards PC users and gamers. I would suggest you check out the forums of this site, which I am also a member of
www.osxhints.com
Its a great resource