I have a hard drive with a 52GB Win XP partition [I used PM for this].
The other 33+ GB is free. I want to add Mepis Linux to a portion of this free space, my questions are:
Can I install Mepis without using QTParted, using PM instead?
Can I use Boot Magic instead of GRUB?
What is the minimum space recommended for a Linux installation?
I know I need parititions for Linux,swap and root and I suppose a partition for FAT. I guess what I really want to know is can I do all of this using PM or if I use QTParted can I use BM instead of GRUB?

i would just let grub or lilo handle the boot process.. it's going to be way easier that way, since it will already be configured and working once the linux is done installing.

for linux partitions.. using partition magic, i would setup:

150mb /boot
512MB~1GB or so /swap
and the rest as / linux doesnt use fat.. so ext3 will be a good choice

when you're installing mephis, just point to those partitions during the setup

Thanks for your quick reply. I mentioned fat because it is my understanding it can be used by Linux and XP to read and write to each other. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Mmmm - I'd thought bootmagic had died and gone to hell.
Guess not - each man to his own poison.

I'd suggest you pre-allocate the FAT32 "shared" partition in advance - a good strategy IMHO. Safest way to share data.
Mepis uses a GUI installer - not something I'm generally in favour of. It should allow you to not install a bootloader, but I honestly can't remember. Your best option would be to choose to install it to the root partition, and load it from bootmagic - means 2 loaders, but if that's what you want ...
Do the partitioning from the installer - tell it to use the unallocated space, and it'll give you a separate /home and do reasonable general setup. Your personal files will go in /home - handy if someday you need to do a full re-install. The installer will offer to keep that partition rather than over-write it - yes, I've "been there, done that"

FAT32 is fine for file storage, but Linux needs to see a different type of FS for the program etc.. EXT3, ReiserFS or EXT2 would be the most common choices in the major distros.