To read from the windows side, there's a program called Macdrive. Its not free, but is a great program. I've tried the demo and considering buying it.
Do be careful, though. If you use this, any problems you get on your windows partiton can effect the mac side, thus creating potential problems.
As for naming your vista partiton, you'll need your mac to be able to read ntfs partitons, which is specific to windows. Macs don't format in that way. Thus, there are a few option. You can try yourself (depending on how well your computer skills are) and use something free like Macfuse or NTFS-3G or you can pay for a program called paragon (they have a demo,too) which also works really well.