>Quick side question - I have about a years experience in Borland C++ builder [and another 20+ years in other languages - including VFP], I've never done anything with Delphi - though I have a copy of version 4 that came with Builder. Can you quickly summarize what Delphi is - or point me to a web site, and whether there is any overlap with my C++builder experience. Also is Kylix related to Delphi? I'm interested in learning something that would allow cross-platform development on Linux/Windows and trying to assess the learning curve.

Delphi is Borland's Object Pascal development environment.
All of the components in Borland's VCL that you use in C++ Builder come from Delphi and are written in Object Pascal.
Kylix is the port of Delphi to Linux and Kylix 3 adds C++. It uses CLX instead of VCL, CLX is a cross platform version of VCL that works on both Windows and Linux and is supported by Delphi and C++ Builder.
borland.com provides info on all of the above products.

There are threads discussing Kylix in the Linux section on the UniversalThread.

Other cross platform GUI Toolkits:
wxWindows - http://www.wxwindows.org/
QT - http://www.trolltech.com/ used in KDE - http://kde.org/
Tk - http://www.tcl.tk/ is popular with *nix nerds and has bindings to many lanuages besides Tcl - PerlTk http://www.perltk.org/, Python Tkinter http://www.python.org/topics/tkinter/, Ruby Tk http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html to name a few