The same thing would happen with NT 4 and Win 2K too, Kenny.
When you install WinXP (or the others), the install gets a unique Security Identifier (SID), and all the users of that particular system have the same SID attached to their user accounts.
When you secure a folder under NTFS, your Username and SID are associated with that security tag - and nobody else can open it (depending on how you set it). Say for instance you build another XP machine and make yourself a user account with the same name, then hook this drive up to that machine... your new user account may have the same name, but will have a DIFFERENT SID, and you won't be able to open it.
That's why I say 'keep good backups'.
on edit: If you look in your registry, you will see your SID listed in the HKEY_Users group. Each user will have one something like this:
S-1-5-21-7623811015-3361044348-030300820-1013
I used to have a hack lying around for changing SIDs, but I am not sure where it is, at the moment... it used to be easy, but since SP2, Microsoft quit supporting that protocol years ago when it was discovered hackers could get into secure files by sniffing and duplicating UID/SID identifiers.