goingware: Visual C++ is truly evil; you have my deepest sympathies. As far as the STL implementation goes, there are patches available from the people who wrote it, and they'll be glad to sell you a version that doesn't suck as well (nice little game they have going with Microsoft there, eh?). But if you're used to GCC, cygwin or mingw is probably a better bet anyway. Watch out for the licensing trap with cygwin.dll with Cygwin, though; last time I looked, that DLL was GPL'd, which will bite you in the ass if you're doing commercial development with it. Mingw avoids that problem.Last day...
...before vacation. Kick ass. Plus, the parts for my Mom's computer arrived (it's hard to turn down a $69 ECS K7VZA motherboard with a $29 AMD Duron 800MHz CPU, even if it gives her twice the computer I currently have; btw, that pricing was for the combo only), so I've got a toy to play with tonight. :-)
Signing off for two weeks. Later, folks.