Consider looking into Cygwin or MSYS if you want Windows access to *nix tools.
To hide the console window, use a .pyw extension on your Python scripts and/or run them with pythonw instead of python.
For the last, Mark Hammond's win32 extensions will probably be needed, but other than that, I have no idea :)
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list