I have the exact same hardware sitch...
2X40GB drives = 80GB stripe.
trebor, you ask what the point is of partitioning?
Well, if he only has these 2 drives in his machine, the point of partitioning the stripe is so that when the time comes to format c:, he has a spot where he has saved his 'data'... ie files he wants to keep....
I however don't see the point of a separate drive for swap or games. Swap on a separate partition on the same physical stripe will not offer any perf adv. and once XP is blown away, the games will not work anyway, so keeping them on a separate drive is pointless. I look at games the same way I do program files, as in they belong on c.
That being said, I think it makes sense to have 2 partitions. I personally have chosen (for no good reason) to have a 30 GB Windows partition (XP, program files etc.) and a 50 GB data partition.
Once I have installed XP, all updates, drivers and what i consider to be 'base apps' like office, photoshop, and whatever tweaking apps or utilities, I use ghost to image the C partition, and dump it to D.....
At that point, a FRESH XP INSTALL takes about 15 minutes to load from the image file on D....
my .02