I have worked with people who done wxPython. I can write really basic python but I dont like the language myself. I prefer perl and theres a wxPerl as well but thats a pure personal choice. Also a wxWidgets in C/C++. So wx is a good road to take and I would certainly think that wxPython would be a good call. Theres also SDL which is a cross platform GUI library and it has Python, C and Perl bindings as well as a bunch of others. Another is TCL and TK GUI stuff too.
One other option if you have the capability is to write the interface as a web page and get that to collect up some edit boxes, drop downs and radio buttons and then pass it on to a CGI program. We have that here with the members map which I wrote in Perl (link in sig if you havent been there). Web interfaces are pretty simple so if it gets too complicated then your probably better off with a proper app. If it gets any more complicated for a web page then people generally move to flash. Anyway, if you write it as a web page and run the app on a CGI server then you have to have a web server to host it on. If the action is quite quick then you can run it on the guild server but I guess that what your doing is dead slow. You were talking many hours on your challenge entry.
Once you have the GUI done and you want to draw some lines on a bitmap ready for the app you can use many different interfaces to image processing tools. If what I need must be real fast then I sometimes use the open GL perl interface or else use the image magick binding for perl. Both of these have python and C interfaces as well. This site uses image magick for all its attachments as well as the challenge thumb scraper.
Don't know Boa Constructor personally so I'm not capable of being charming
Oh yes should have also added... You can get a free development suites for C/C++ from the Gnu folks or MS or Intel on Linux. Here is a good roundup...
http://www.freebyte.com/programming/cpp/#cppcompilers
of that list, I would look at MS Visual Studio Express which is very complete and the Visual MinGW one using the MinGW make and GCC compiler which is arguably better in some ways but perhaps a touch more tricky. Having a VHDL background tho, you would not find either difficult.
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