So I'm new to C++ and I want to do some simple GUI programming using a toolkit. I don't want to use Qt, or WxWidgets, or the Windows Api (uhg!). Oh, and I don't want to use .NET or Visual C++.
ncurses isn't really a GUI framework... it's a console framework.
The two big, popular ones are wxWidgets and Qt... which you're already ruled out (why?). So I guess the next one up would be either FLTK or GTK+... although if you don't like wx I don't think you'll like GTK+ very much.