I would look at FLTK - the Fast Light Tookkit (either version 1.1 or 1.3)
http://www.fltk.org/documentation.php/doc-1.1/toc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLTK
http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/ (a beginners tutorial)
- FLTK is a simpler, light weight GUI toolkit, and is quite popular with open source projects working on smaller scale apps.
- It is less elegant than Qt, but has a much shallower learning curve.
- It does have a rather clunky event handling system, but can be used in a well strutured, object oriented manner if you want to.
I also see that Stroustrup chose FLTK as the library to use to teach GUI programming in his book:
http://www.stroustrup.com/Programming/
I would seriously consider this book as a starting point. Once you know the basics of object oriented GUI design, you could then read the various discussions/flame wars and decide which toolkit you prefer. Or if you want to get involved in a particular open source project, or industry sector, that might find your mind is made up for you!
As far as IDEs go I would use Visual Studio on Windows, as the debugger is nice and friendly. I also quite like CodeLite, which I use on Ubuntu and Windows (I find the debugger and project tree make more sense to me, but then I come from a Visual Studio background).
The current versions of Qt, wxWidgets, and FLTK all provide Visual Studio solutions and projects, to there's no problems there.
Neither MFC nor ATL, which WTL relies on, come with Visual Studio Express. So they don't figure here, unless you want to fork out money (or turn criminal!)
Andy