Here is a simple test case of the problem I'm having:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\begin{document}
\begin{longtable}{p{2in}|p{5in}}
foo & \parindent=1in bar \\
\end{longtable}
\begin{tabular}{p{2in}|p{5in}}
foo & \parindent=1in bar \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
This produces the following output

(I'm using "XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.2 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)" on Ubuntu 11.04). There are two problems with this:
- There are different default indentation settings in
tabularandlongtable - In the
longtableenvironment, I can't seem to redefine the indentation using\parindent
I'm not so much concerend with #1 if I can solve #2.