MoreCooler.com: It's more cooler with the thing

I'm looking to brush up on my C++ skills, possibly with a simple game or somesuch. It's been a while since I've spent days searching for dropped semicolons, so I'm a bit out of the loop: what's a good compliler/IDE these days? No Microsoft, including C# and .NET, please. Needs to be for a Win32 environment, as I intend to do some DirectX 9 stuff. Oh, and no, I don't want to do this in Java. No game company worth their salt uses it; too damn slow.

IIRC, Codewarriors had a good product; anyone use them lately? Borland used to do some good stuff, too.

I'm a Borland guy myself. Altho its still been awhile :) And there are a few free IDE's out there too.. (did you know you can download the Microsoft C/C++ compiler for free? Just no IDE..)

Has anybody tried any good free IDE. I am supposed to find something for work and they are very cheap there. Let me know if you have found any free IDE's that you actually liked.

Can it be written by a German? ;-)

It can be written in german if...
The person lived in the US,
has never been to Germany,
every other comment must read: I love the USA,
and the coder cannot understand german.
Then they may consider it.