It can actually be quite confusing. The answers listed above are all correct, it is the questions which are different and perhaps I should have explained in more detail, but I just went for the fast answer to both questions.
I know I am going to word this poorly, but you can prove all of this out. 
Technically HFS+ is case sensitive. OS X removes the case sensitivity, OS X itself strips out the case when dealing with file names. It preserves the case for the actual file name, but it does not use case in and of itself. This is why you cannot have a file named test.txt and TEST.txt in the same folder. When writing OS X Apple took steps to make Unix easy for the end user. One of the confusions they considered was that people would get confused seeing multiple files with what appear to be the same name (one letter may have a different case but otherwise the file name looks identical) so OS X was written to not allow files to be named the same except for case. A great example would be two files in the same folder named "my notes from the launch meeting.doc" and "My notes from the launch meeting.doc". Which is the correct one? OS X just prevents these two files from residing in the same folder space. Therefore the test above I gave you (creating the file and looking at it with different cases) works the way it does.
Now on to the windows part. Windows sees your shared folders as a Network Share. Windows sees the share as what it is .... a Unix FS. The rules of Unix tell you that case sensitivity must be preserved. And so Windows plays by the rules and does just that. You can prove that out by mapping your PSF share as a network drive and using a cmd window to migrate to the folder where you created the TEST.TXT file. You can 'more TEST.TXT' and get the expected results. Doing a 'more test.txt' will tell you the file does not exist (which it really doesn't).
To make all of that 'short' Windows is actually properly playing by the rules, OS X is making their own rules so as to make life easier on the end user to prevent confusion.
If I made a muddy situation even muddier with the above, my apologies.
Last edited: Jun 16, 2007
