That is why I'm trying to offer an alternative build platform for Windows. The bitcoin source is the same. Not changed at all. Except with changes as above. It should (famous last words) be easier to pretty up a windows version in MSVC than in Qt. At least it seems so to me at this time. Qt is fine but it seems to have a lot of compatibility issues with its compiler, its libraries, etc.
Have you seen my thread on building BitcoinD and BitcoinQt using MSVC?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349094Are you saying you want to get rid of Qt and use native Windows GUI?
I wonder if you could just turn the daemon into a DLL and then put a C# wrapper around it? I've discovered that doing a GUI in C# is way easier than Qt.
Also, concerning the aborts when closing the application: when I was porting the latest bitcoin source (the unreleased latest from github) to MSVC about a month ago, I found a bug in their shutdown sequence that caused aborts. It was due the shutdown unwinding the bitdb object which needed to be explicity closed() first. The abort was happening in the boost string code and was difficult to track down.
https://github.com/ClaireDuSoleil/bitcoin/commit/9987452a5d9c37afa8abf12abe85fc9429a3fb36I don't know if this is what is causing this user's problem but I thought I would mention it.