win32 and OOP

Getting through this stuff is like swimming through jelly... well, I don't really have any idea what it'd be like to swim through jelly, but I'd guess that it's slow and requires enormous effort.
I expected it would be nice and simple, but instead I'm looking at a template class called a ControllerFactory which inherits from the abstract CtrlFactory class.
Having not known about templates nor really thought much about virtual functions and abstract classes (nor about operator and operator cast overloading) before getting stuck into these tutorials, it's more like a series of wakeup-calls about C++ (in that the author assumes that the reader is already entirely comfortable with such aspects) than lessons in win32 programming.
Hopefully there's some point soon at which I get a grasp on the way OO methodology is used to wrap ugly winapi code, and then I can move a little faster.
It's so easy to be arrogant and make false assumptions about your coding ability when you have any experience - coming from functional (or trial and error) programming to the OO paradigm is a much bigger step than I ever gave credit for.

It doesn't really help my concentration that my guts are screaming at me for eating all that chinese food last night... especially the "soup" with those orange chilli bean things. Gak!