Just makin a comment about my experience with OC on MS.

I developed a Window software product using OpenCOBOL, although it wasn't a big hit, 
there are a handful of people using it everyday at one particular company. 
I built a "setup.exe" for my product and included the MS Re-distributable C  
run-time, as well as other dependencies. 
From Download to "up and running" is about 7 clicks. 
It links to SP2.dll for the GUI, and Tcl85.dll, QLite3.dllfor the database, 
and my own vue3.dll library for my V/Plus-View3000 emulation. 
It consisted of about 18,000 lines of COBOL code, and the vue3.dll was also written 
using OpenCOBOL and about 5000 lines of code. 
None of the COBOL in this product was ported from somewhere else, 
it was all written from scratch for Windows & COBOL SP2, using a simple editor 
called Programmer Studio. 
My point is that I'm not talking about some little test program, 
this is a full-blown application evolving multiple dependencies -- with user base.
I didn't use Visual Studio at all, I agree that VS is unusable, however I chose cl.exe over gcc. 
Even on Windows you can still use the compile and link commands on the command-line, 
no need for Visual Studio, notepad will work in a pinch. 
For me, I used the cobc -c option to gen the C code, and ran that through the cl.exe, 
and then the linker. If more detail is needed I could boot-up 
the Windows box and get more detail syntax for you. 
Or look at how I used OC on Windows XP, Vista, and Window7. http://www.cloud3000.com

This was not an easy lesson to learn, it involved much MS confusion, 
and debugging, debugging, debugging. 
At one point I download all the Windows XP symbols and put the entire OS into debug mode. 
I had a similar experience with OpenCOBOL on HPUX and gcc, and the moral of the story is: 
Use the C compiler that was designed for the platform that you are developing on. 
I understand the Gnu development environment is exceptionally good, 
much better than MS development environment. 
I went though all the various COBOL compilers Tiny Cobol,
Kobol, Fujitsu Student Version, 
all of them failures. 
For Production I've always user MF and Acu, or Fujitsu. My first shot at OC was using CygWin, 
and MinGW, and what I learned from writing a real application 
and debugging -- Windows Development Environment is a train-wreck! And cl.exe was designed 
for just such a train-wreck!
One of the strength of OpenCOBOL is that it doesn't require gcc, you can use the C compiler 
for what ever platform that you are running on. Therefore, it is really multi-platform.

--
Mike.