The Win32 port of GTk+ is a work in progress, and not as stable or correct as the Unix/X11 version. For more information about the Win32 port, see http://www.gimp.org/tml/gimp/win32/ or http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32/ . The current (CVS) version of the Win32 backend is *not* as stable as it was before the no-flicker branch was merged. A zipfile with that version is available from http://www.gimp.org/win32/. That should be use by "production" code until this CVS version is usable. (But note, the Win32 backend has never been claimed to be "production quality".) To build GTk+ on Win32, you need either the Microsoft compiler and tools, or gcc-2.95 or later. The mingw setup of gcc is preferred, but you can run gcc also under cygwin-b20.1 or later. Compile in gdk\win32, gdk and gtk with `nmake -f makefile.msc` or `make -f makefile.cygwin`. The name makefile.cygwin is misleading, it should really be called makefile.mingw. See the README.win32 file in the GLib distribution for instructions how to build with gcc. To use GTk+ on Win32, you also need either of the above mentioned compilers. Other compilers might work, but don't count on it. The same instructions on how to set up a correct version of gcc should also be followed if you want to build applications that use GTk+ with gcc. The tablet support uses the Wintab API. The Wintab development kit can be downloaded from http://www.pointing.com. If you don't care for that, undefine HAVE_WINTAB in config.h.win32 and remove references to the wntab32x library from the makefile before building. GTk+ wants to be built with the GNU "intl" library for internationalisation (i18n). Get the version ported to Win32 (not a very big deal) from tml's web site mentioned above. We build the "intl" library as a DLL called gnu-intl.dll (the "gnu" prefix is used to reduce name clash risks). If you don't want any i18n stuff, undefine ENABLE_NLS, HAVE_GETTEXT and HAVE_LIBINTL in the config.h.win32 file, and remove references to the gnu-intl library from the makefiles. Note that while the GNU gettext package is under the GPL, the "intl" part of it which is distributed with GNU libc is under the LGPL (like GTk+ or GLib). We want the LGPL one, even if they are the same, more or less.