mcavic - 8:27 pm on Nov 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

does this command seem right?

tar cvf - directory ¦ gzip -c > directory.gz

To test the generated file, in Linux, try:
gunzip -c directory.gz ¦ tar tvf -

And that should give you a list of files in the archive. This is my preferred method in Linux, though I don't have all that much experience with it in Windows. You might need to call it directory.tar.gz instead of directory.gz. That way, after it's decompressed in Windows, it'll be a tar file, which still needs to be extracted.