I'll try to give an answer to your first question.
I presume that you know how to create a shared folder called "Downloads" on your Windows machine. You must know the IP address of your Windows system (e. g. 192.168.0.1). I also assume that your user name is "cody" with the password "mypwd" and the system is a member of the workgroup "MYGROUP". Then you can open a terminal inside your virtual machine running Knoppix and issue the following commands
Code:
sudo mkdir /media/windowsbox
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.0.1/Downloads /media/windowsbox -o user="MYGROUP/cody%mypwd",uid=1000,gid=1000
You should be able to access the shared folder on your windows machine under /media/windowsbox.
You can unmount the shared folder with the command
Code:
sudo umount /media/windowsbox