While router channel conflict is a common problem in denser areas, I found out that my variable speed central heater was causing power and radio interference with my internet connection when it turned on. The heater manufacturer had a kit to fix it though. I only noticed the interference source while using a portable AM radio and listening between the radio stations.
DOS batch files has too many limitations when compared to other scripting languages. It's frozen in time. I consider Windows PowerShell to be the batch file successor.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/powershell.aspx
I participated in an ACM programming contest once, and you're not looking at the time issue correctly. I remember one problem that involved complicated time calculation that was impossible with writing in C/C++ from scratch on short notice, but it's easy with the Gregorian calendar class in Java. Good programmers can handle any mainstream language syntax, but the capability of the language and its libraries are much more important when programming time is even more important.
It depends on what itch you want to scratch. Improve the tools that you want to use. If all else fails, you could look at Eclipse and cppcheck.
A million lines of code isn't totally out of the question.
It's helpful that I worked on a few open source projects that are indexed by ohloh.net. It provides excellent statistics on file type, comment ratio, total lines changed and so forth. For the 8 years of my work it indexed, I wrote about 400,000 lines of changes with about a 19% comment ratio. About 280,000 lines are for C/C++/Java files. I'd say that a large portion of those changes were for fixing/improving lines of code and not creating new functionality.
"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." - Martin Mull