thanks for all your help guys!
I just resized my partition and rebooted into windows to make sure it worked. and just as UnderScore said I got the blue screen for CHKDSK and it analyzed everything and rebooted and then windows was ok.
I was only able to resize it a little. I guess windows always puts *some* data near the end of the partition, because I am only using about 3 gigs of the 18 in windows, but qtparted thought that ~17 gigs were used. so I made a 1 gig ext3 and a 300 meg swap. maybe I'll change it to FAT32 now that I read eco2geek's post.
Thanks for the warning about unclean unmount of the persistent home. I can deal with some inode errors and know that it isn't because I did something bad every time.

One funny thing is when I created the ext3 partition, qtparted output to the terminal:
"This ext2 filesystem has a strange layout! I cannot resize it yet."

I guess that is because it was ext3. in any case, I am going to try rebooting now and making a persistent home on the new partition!

In regards to backing up... this is my work PC so I can't really back anything up. if windows had decided it would not boot with the resized partition, I guess I would have tried to undo the resize, and if that failed I'd tell the computer management ppl at work that my PC crashed and they would have redone everything..... so I could try again!! hahahaha. Linux rocks.