1) then i found the Forgers win32 api tutorial. most tutorials are not all that great, and there are one or two mistakes in this one, but by far, it is the best, and is basically what started me with windows programming, and will probably provide you with most of the information you need to start writing windows applications, if not all the info you need for a basic application.
(the only real mistake that i remember in it is that if you are using dialogs, etc. you MUST include <afxres.h> in your resource file, otherwise it will not compile correctly!)
2) MSDN is an invaluable resource for individual functions, structures, and workings of the windows api. if i am looking to create a new thread, i might do a google search and learn that there is a function called CreateThread() in the windows api. google again with the name of the function and probably the first entry that should come up is the MSDN article with detailed info on that specific function. I will warn however, that MSDN is not very good for learning how to do a task per say (if i want to learn how to draw a bitmap in a window that ive created, there are many steps that you have to take, and MSDN won't necesarily tell you all of them, just the individual functions like BeginPaint() and BitBlt()...)
3) devcpp is amazing, and i could not recommend a better IDE!
no problem :) just glad i could help!
oh, and another nice thing about dev-c++ i forgot to mention: if you haven't found them already, if you start a new project, then select 'windows application', and check either 'c' or 'c++' it will start you out with a sort of "template" for a windows application, then you can build on if from there. good luck learning!