Moving email from Outlook Express on Windows XP to Leopard Mail

What are the steps I should take to move my email from a Windows XP computer running Outlook Express to my new iMac running OS X 10.5 and Mail?
I'm assuming I have to move the mailbox files from the Windows machine to the iMac and then run some kind of import.
Where are the mailbox files on the Windows machine and what are they called?
Does Mail support a direct import of those files or do I have to convert them somehow? If I have to convert them, is there an export command in Outlook Express that will do the trick? If not, what do I need to do to convert the files? Is there an application (preferably a free one that can do the trick)?
Finally, anything I should know about that could cause an import of email to choke - bad characters in folder names, too many emails in a folder, subsubfolders, etc.?
Thanks in advance,
Steve

Since there were no responses, I figured I'd post my own solution. After searching around online, there seem to be several ways to accomplish this. The first I tried was installing Thunderbird on the XP box and importing the Outlook Express email into it. This seemed to have grabbed most of my email. For some reasons a few boxes did not show up in Thunderbird though. Next step was to move the Thunderbird mailboxes over to the Leopard box and run the import process in Mail. This worked for all of my boxes except my Sent mail which choked the import routine (spinning beach ball). So, I went back into Thunderbird and split the 12K emails in the sent box into 6 separate email boxes and moved those over to the Mac. They imported fine. Then I just moved the messages back into the sent box.
That still left the few mystery mail folders that didn't import into Thunderbird. For those, I downloaded a utility that converted dbx to mbox format. Ran it on those boxes, renamed the new file extensions to mbox from mbx and moved those to the Mac and imported them into Leopard.
For some reason one box still didn't come across. But I just forwarded the 8 emails in that box to myself.
It took forever (mainly because the XP machine was so slow and because of the number of emails). But, it did work.

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