The default window location on Windows is (40,40). This is very annoying for me because it's behind my task bar ( http://i35.tinypic.com/2qwhgrp.png ). The correct way to handle this is to let Windows decide where to put it with CW_USEDEFAULT. Caveat emptor: I didn't test this with a full compile; I'm not sure how to cross-compile from the Linux VM where I do my dev-work.