I've stated working on a Win32 extension written in C.  There's not a lot 
there yet, but at least I kind of know how to do it - and it's actually 
pretty easy writing C extensions for Ruby (I just learned how last 
night:), don't even need to bother with  SWIG in my case.  So far I've 
only got three functions:
InWinNT? - returns true if running on an NT (probably will return true on 
2K as well, but I haven't tried it)
InWin9x? - returns true if running on Win(95|98) (WinME?)
GetOSVer - returns a hash with platform, version, build#

I plan to add other process related functions having to do with starting, 
timing and killing Win32 processes (borrowing from some Perl modules like 
Win32::Process for example).  The long range goal would be to duplicate 
the functionality of much of the Perl Win32 module hierarchy.

A couple of questions:
1) is anybody else out there doing this already?  I don't want to 
duplicate effort - I notice that there is an SWin module on the RAA, but 
it seems to be oriented toward graphical programming.
2) What about naming conventions for the module hierarchy?  Would Win32 be 
an appropriate name for the toplevel module - with things like 
Win32::Admin (a collection of functions for gathering administrative 
details of a system - like the ones I presented above), Win32::Process, 
etc.  We could follow Perl's Win32 module  hierarchy (to make it easier 
for the  Perl refugees :) or we could come up with something on our own.

comments, ideas?

Phil