I just installed cygwin on windows Vista and started X11 which does fvwm in a non-rooted window that hides the windows desktop somewhat. I am editing this file using xemacs. so now I have a good editor for text files on Windows plus all the development stuff in cygwin.
In Xemacs under X11 under Cygwin on Vista. I installed cygwin last night. The release is better integrated than it was a year ago. You click on an icon to start the X server, run an xterm and xemacs. You don't have to run startx from the console as before. You can do that and get a rooted desktop with twm or fvwm. You can run without a window manager, just in the server, and then run the window manager. You start fvwm out of the xterm, for example and decorate the xterm. An error caused by this makes it better to run a new xterm from the window manager.
Right now, the xterm and xemacs run rootless on top of windows. This is good.
Today, I also found that the news reader out of windows mail (probably Outlook) works just fine. The only problem is that it looks like e-mail so so have to delete read messages. I can live with this for as long as I don't have Linux installed on the hard drive.
I havn't decided which distro to install on this system, and for now I am content to explore the complexity in cygwin. There are GTK and gnome things but I haven't found KDE or Gnome. I should look for gimp.
BTW, the windows games are nicer than they were under XP. Vista has enhanced graphics. It may also be much bigger. I think Cygwin is more than 1 GB.