tools for starting a new c++ project

Here are some tools I recommend for anyone starting up a new project (on Windows), most of which are free for personal use or somewhat cheap...

Perforce (http://www.perforce.com/) - source control that's easy to setup, easy to use, and has a free personal license.  I know many programmers don't see the point of source control for small personal projects, but I find it invaluable.  First and foremost having a changelist history will become invaluable as your project grows, and it also helps you pick up where you left off when you happen to have months in between development.

Visual Studio (http://www.microsoft.com/Express/) - even if you don't use this for primary editing (I use slickedit for actual code writing) it's invaluable for managing projects/compilation, and the debugger is invaluable.  If you're not down with using VS for whatever reason, you can always go the mingw route (http://www.mingw.org/) and compile using gcc + makefiles.  I've heard mention of Code::Blocks (http://www.codeblocks.org/) as an IDE to use with mingw, but I haven't tried it myself.

Slickedit  (http://www.slickedit.com/) - this has been my primary IDE for nearly a decade now.  At first glance most people don't see the point, but the beauty of this program is that you can configure exactly to what you like, and eliminate the rest.  If you don't want to spend money however, there's plenty of other free/cheaper options out there, but your best bet would probably be XEmacs (http://www.xemacs.org/).   It's not pretty, but it can do pretty much anything you could ever want in an editor.

Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) - this is a fairly powerful issue/bug tracker that has some decent licensing options (right now they have a 5-user for $5 promotion actually).  the UI is a bit brutal, but it's all web based and definitely has all the features you'll need (plus plugin support for everything else).

auspicious beginnings

Not much to say, just getting the ball rolling...