Looking for Info & recomendations for Virtual Box

I just got a 240 gig SSD. I'm thinking of putting Zorin on that and installing virtual box as well. I've no experience with virtual box, other than some basic info. I've read. I'm thinking of allocating half of the drive for Zorin and the swap file and the rest for the virtual machine. I plan to put either windows 7 or xp on for the virtual machine. Questions I have:

1) Should I create a partition ahead of time for the VM and if so, is there a particular format I should use (e.g. ntfs)?

2) I have several ntfs volumes on another drive. Are these visible to the VM to read from and write to?

3) Does the VM have usb support for flash drives?

4) Does Virtual Box require any additional programs to be fully functional and if so, what are they?

5) If you install programs, like I want to install MS Office, are there any special things you need to do to get them to install, or do you just go through the same installation steps that you do from within Windows?

in answer to #1 No, you don't need any partions it creates a .vdi file in virtualbox just be sure to check "fixed storage" when you are creating a virtual drive and make sure that you allocate at least 25GB because windows is huge.

In answer to #2 you have to set it in the vm settings under "shared storage".

in answer to #3 yes, but you have to download the virtualbox extension pack. (do that through virtualbox it works better than downloading it from their site.)

In answer to #4: Yes, although it isn't a program you need to install the virtualbox extension pack see #3.

In answer to #5 No, you don't need any special things to get the to install you just do it like normal, although if you are doing a virtual machine I would recommend insert that guest additions image and run the executable file on the virtual CD as administrator. If you have any other questions, just ask.

And a P.S Libreoffice is a great alternative to MS office and if you want it to look more like office 2007-2013 you can try Kingsoft office.
And a P.S.S anything you run in the virtual machine will be a lot slower than on your physical machine espically if you don't have virtualization enabled in the BIOS (I recommend enabling that in the BIOS so you can get more power out of your vitual machine although on some BIOSes it doesn't have the option).

You may find my guide useful.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2380&p=12617&hilit=virtual+box+virtualbox#p10056

Thank you codewhiz; for taking the time to answer all of my questions. I'll have to see if my motherboard supports virtualization.

Thank you madvinegar for that link to the tutorial on setting it up too. I'll surely need that

Your welcome, This is one thing I know a lot about because I've had quite a few linux distrobutions running in virtual machines and I had windows in a virtual machine until I found the tools that I needed to finally get away from it completely.