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You STILL have NT4???

One end of the cable is Windows 7 professional, the other end is NT4 server.

I assume you want access to the NT servers storage devices? I would use iSCSI, but first you need to be able to have them be able to ping each other. Why do you not want a cheap 4-port $22 firewall/router? It would be the easiest way to make a small network, and no need to open it to the Internet is you want 100% security.

Umm, that was the problem: with the Windows 7 firewall on, they could not ping each other. (Actually the client could ping the server but the server could not ping the client.) Not to mention NT does not support iSCSI.

Where did I say anything about Internet on this network? A router would do nothing but add latency. Surely you are not saying a cheap router is an easier solution than a short bundle of a few good wires?

It is essentially a client server architecture. The internet seems to be Host to Host because routers act as packet servers. In your two host scheme, you will need a packet server. One of the two devices needs to act as the server (router), probably by enabling routing on the NT box (which seems to be the server) ala something like,

Route Add 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 metric 2

You may get less latency with software routing, but we're talking in the ~1 ms on a 3 foot cable.

There are iSCSI drivers for storage devices in the NT era... It depends on your hard drive, or other storage devices to get the iSCSI drivers for it. And... gigabit Ethernet cards would give better performance.

I'd be interested in iSCSI if I could do it. So far I don't see how with the NT server. There seem to exist third party drivers for NT to be an iSCSI initiator but no way (that I have found) to make NT server be an iSCSI target, which is what I would need. I am still looking. However, although I would prefer the functionality of iSCSI, simple file sharing works for me at the moment.

A router is a device that forwards packets between subnets. A router would have no function in this network, in which both nodes of the network are on the same subnet. If by "router" you mean a switch, there is no reason to use a switch when a simple cable is all that's necessary.