Hi,
I'm not sure I would listen to the people who say not to partition. Why?
Well, mechanically, there might not be any reason to do so. That's fine. Logically, there's plenty of reason.
For instance, lets say you get a virus or something that trashes your OS. You can't log in and the only way to get access to your system is via some boot disk or formatting and reinstalling your OS. If your C drive is your entire drive, then when you format, you lose everything.
That said, I'd say split it up for that reason alone but you already want to split it up. If it was a small drive I might not say that.
The way I normally do it is to decide on what I want to install on the C drive first. What I normally do is install all/most of the things that have shared files in the windows directory first. Office and other applications, perhaps photoshop and dreamweaver, etc. I may or may not leave out games. So, that is how you want to determine your C drive size.
If you have a 232g HD, I'd say if you intend to put your games on your C drive, no less than 80gb. You dont want to limit yourself for future games if you want them all on C. If you want your games on the other partition, then make your first partition around 40gb for vista and maybe 25gb for XP (this will include apps). I dont know aobut you, but my desktop can get pretty heavy sometimes and that is on C for me. Those are just rough. Really rough. I just see no reason to short yourself on the C drive when you have so much room on the other partitions.
Right now, I have a 72gb hard drive as my C and a 320gb hard drive as my backup drive.
Good luck!