Just some additional remarks concerning the GUI.

- initially we thought it a good idea to use native widgets on each
  major platform (Motif, Win32). This, however, added a huge amount of
  overhead in abstract and factory classes to hide each widget and the
  result was not really portable. The implementation and the result
  was basically like Java's AWT (pretty ugly, lowest common denominator,
  and not really portable, i.e. GUI looks fairly different on each
  platform).

- with the introduction of the new ROOT GUI classes (which support the
  look and feel of the familiar and good looking Win95 widgets) we
  planned to introduce a really cross-platform toolkit. The benefit of
  this is:
    - exactly same experience for ROOT users on either Win32 or X11 platforms
    - easy coding and true cross-platform behaviour of all GUI components
    - full control over look and feel (should be possible to update or
      add later new themes)

  the disadvantage:
    - die-hard Win32 users miss the latest, latest M$ improvements in the
      Win32 GUI and X11 users have to accepts the look of something else than
      Motif

  we expect the advantages to outweight the disadvantage. Java has gone the
  same way by implementing the JFC (which defines a complete native
  cross-platform GUI).

  So (after getting the Win32 makefiles sorted out) the most urgent task to
  tackle is to port the TGWin32 part of TGXW. It is likely that the X11
  oriented TGXW will need to be modified in some places to accommodate
  the Win32 port. The sooner the better, especially since it could break
  some existing code (which I hope not). That it can be done is proven
  by a port of the X11 based GTK GUI library to Win32, see:
  http://www.vtt.fi/tte/staff/tml/gimp/win32/).

Cheers, Fons.