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.