Sound, time and platform issues

[anton muhin]

Hello everybody!

I need advice and expertise of the community for the following problem.

I'm going to make a psycholinguistic experiment. In this experiment the 
auditor is asked to listen to some text and to press the button when 
some event occurs. I need to find out reaction time on different inputs 
and, therefore, I need 1) rather accurate (or, at least, constantly 
biased) estimates for the moment the button was pressed, and 2) 
"real-time" sound playing.

Googling finds out several Python toolkits for dealing with sound, but 
they are for Linux, not Windows.

Therefore questions:
1. Does anybody know about Python tools that might help to solve the 
problem above for Windows?
2. Is there any C/C++ solution? (in this case I might provide Python 
bindings).
3. If there is no Windows solution, what is the simplest way to use 
Linux? I have a notebook and rather limited knowledge of Linux. I don't 
want to install Linux on the notebook---harddrive is somewhat limited. 
However, I heard that there are some variants of *nix that needs only 
boot-CD. Does anybody have experience with systems like these?

Sorry for a bunch of questions and thank you in advance.

With best regards,
anton.