Welcome back. :-D
Regarding GCC, after Stefan's last fixing commit, GCC 4.4.2 builds ReactOS quite fine. I uploaded a Image to Colin's Webspace which seems to work rather well. On the same location you can find RosBE 1.5 Beta 1, which already includes GCC 4.4.2 and a new Binutils Version with Timo's patches. It works surprisingly well. I hope HTO will document his steps to this nice GCC Build he made.