novice help needed: how to add field from another table?

thanks in advance for reading guys; long time mapinfo user now trying to get to grips with arcgis 9.3....

I have pointfile1 and bufferfile2. several points from pointfile1 fall within several polygons in bufferfile2, lots of overlapping. what I'm trying to do is have a new column (or columns if need be) in the bufferfile2 that has a list of all the pointfile1 IDs that fall within it, that's it.

I'm not sure how to start; in mapinfo I would use mapbasic, and in arcgis9.3 I can see that the field calc is limited to the current table or maybe not what I'm after here anyway. I'm aware that python is the scripter of choice for ESRI but know very little of it, but am willing to give it a go....any step by step guidance here would be very gratefully received, thanks all.

thanks,

chrisj