Building Windows fat clients

I'm asking this group because we tend to think alike wrt to data modeling
and separation of concerns ;-)

Any recommendations on ORM libraries for new Windows development? The last
time I started anything from scratch was over 10 years ago, and the "state
of the art" seemed to be to smash everything together into event handlers on
GUI objects. Ugh. I pulled the M of the MVC out into separate coherent
classes and implemented a *very* simple ORM, leaving the VC mostly conflated
in the event handlers--which is not too bad since this app will never need
to be cross-platform.

So the dev tool was discontinued, some closed-source libraries are getting
less and less compatible by the year, and we're going to rewrite. Where to
start? It's a custom Windows-only app, only installed at one site. Using
.NET would be fine. C# or C++ would be most-preferred language choices,
although we could suck it up and use Java. I don't want to put VB on the
table.

Leaning toward Visual Studio .NET because I know it will be around (in
whatever morphed form) for a while; but also considering Borland's
supposedly revitalized C++ tools because I used C++ Builder with success
back when MS C++ compilers were still awful. I should probably mention that
the Windows apps, with the exception of one complicated "explore customer's
entire history here" screen, are pretty simple; the complexity is in reports
and stored procedures.

Suggestions where to start?

--
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe(at)killerbytes(dot)com
http://www.killerbytes.com/
(303) 722-0567 voice