> somebody told me it's bad to use borland coz the code will be incompatible because borland renames all the functions to something it just made up by itself.

really? it does does it? never noticed anything unworkaroundable...

windows programming isn't designed to be portable

> besides that i have a bad experience with borland because it chews up code every so often and then you have to rewrite it or go to a backup copy.

it has never chewed up my code. but keeping backups is good practice anyway, in case *you* chew up your code and need to revert