Microsoft woes

Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming, and I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a Windows machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course I wanted to simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick tests.
And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in the land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C program which calls the standard library, is just not made routine. 3GB of components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library obtained and downloaded specially. Then the project setting need fiddling with in unexpected and not very obvious ways.
Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles. Considering that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.