Is there any elegant, slick way to avoid having to write the ugly framework for both of these things, or can I get service-like abilities all in one shot on one decent framework?
http://www.firetree.net/calvino/alex/daemon.html Found this guy's article. Seems like an ok approach. Are there any more mainstream, well-supported frameworks that do this?
qtservice ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/solutions/lgpl/ You need Qt. But I cannot recommend TrollTech products after all, because I consider them "way too buggy" (my standards are very high, however).
How about writing for Linux and running on windows within Cygwin? "What is Cygwin? Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality. A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel." http://www.cygwin.com/ It's free.