I've never had Bochs run fast enough to do anything for me. Like I said, it's bloody slow...

Bochs is slower than a crippled turtle. If you're on Linux I think you can use QEMU (I can't remember). VMWare is pretty good, but ROS is still pretty slow on it.

C++ is very powerful, but until the implementation of C++ is actually needed for some specific reason, C will do just fine. Besides, I'm sure that the ReactOS developers will be able to write all of the security libraries or function libraries they need to make it work how it needs to.