HIVE

Nope, I haven't used C++ or Win32 in years. I also don't understand why you'd want to mess with Win32 instead of new C++ standard or not (e.g. boost) libraries that handle everything in a platform independent way.

I thought you used C++ :/
It's native library, those objects offered by Win32 are actually used by the kernel.
Well if I resorted to boost, what non-C concepts would there be for me to learn?

Boost tends to use APIs very similar to those of the standard library (especially considering boost libraries tend to get adopted into stl), so if you ever used the std namespace, boost should be fine.
I have used C++ a lot, but not in the recent years.
Win32 is native, yes, I don't see why that matters to you or how it changes anything.

You are forcing yourself to use a very old and obnoxious API that's specific to one platform, instead of using something much more simpler and standard (or to become standard).

This 420 character limit is just ridiculous.

It's because I'd like to be able to know the instructions the code compiles down to.
I will try boost development, seems like it's free for commercial development. Thanks for the tip.

That's actually the reason I used Win32 too, but in the end it's really not worth it.
In general, the reason you'd use the platform API directly is if you have some specific special use of some functionality, or if there isn't any good library that handles your platform.