First, Make sure you have the Novell client installed on your 2K/XP machine. The latest clients are available from the Novell site. When you log in, a Novell bannered dialog should appear. There are TWO distinct logins here. One for Novell and one for XP. When you provide your name for Novell (in the first part of the box), you need to ensure that you will be logging in to the correct Tree, Context preferred server. Click on the Advanced box on the right hand side to see these options.
The second part is to log in to the XP Active directory on that machine. If it's a new machine, use Administrator for now and work out all the local machine problems with Administrator rights. You can then create your own local user for that machine and secure it from there.

There is a way to tell XP not to use the Novell login as the Workstation login, but I can't recall it at the moment.

There are a couple of other traps with contexts and trees I discovered last night, but we'll leave them for now.