title: What is the quickest path to writing a lightweight GUI program on Windows?
body: <p>I want a small (&lt; 30MB) standalone Windows executable (a single file) that creates a window which asks the user for the location of a directory and then launches a different program in that directory.  </p>
  
  <p>This executable has to run on XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008 versions of Windows in 32-bits and 64 bits on x86-64 architecture as well as Itanium chips.  </p>
  
  <p>It would be spectacular if we only had to build it once in order to run it on all these platforms, but that is not a requirement.  This is for a proprietary system, so GPL code is off-limits.</p>
  
  <p>What is the fastest way to put this together?</p>
  
  <p>These are some things I'm looking into, so if you have info about their viability, I'm all about it:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Perl/Tk using perl2exe to get the binary.</li>
  <li>Ruby with wxruby</li>
  <li>Learn MFC programming and do it the right way like everybody else.</li>
  </ul>