... I've had decent luck using Cygwin/X on my Windows machines...
I would recommend Xming (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming) instead of Cygwin/X. It runs noticeably faster than Cygwin/X, and is even faster if you use fullscreen mode. We have also had trouble with a Windows webcam driver breaking Cygwin/X, but it did not interfere with Xming.
Dan