When I'm away from home, I use my Windows laptop as a dev server. I use the factory distributions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache. They run surprisingly well on Windows.
I've very seldom had any serious problems running drupal under Windows. That is definitely not to say that I'd rely on Windows in a production environment. But it is suitable for a dev server.
I did just spend several hours, however, finding out that if you enable CSS or JS compression in this environment, it can cause Apache to die.
A site I'm working on recently went live and so all of the caching and optimization options were turned on. When I copied over the live database to my laptop, it of course turned on the deadly options.
This is one of those bugs that can take hours to find. I eventually discovered it was something in the variables table and when I diffed a working -vs- non-working table, the performance variables became likely suspects.
I resolved the problem with the following in my settings.php file:
$conf = array(
'preprocess_css' => FALSE,
'preprocess_js' => FALSE,
);