I think something isn't right with the init property becuase when I used it
on a HANDLE (void*) like so:  if(hfile == hfile.init) it would give me the
vague error:

void has no value

I didn't even know what that came from until I searched the dmd src and found that error message in cast.c.  To find the problem in my code, I commented out parts and recompiled a few times.  When I did  hfile = hfile.init it also gave me this error:

cannot implicitly convert void to void*

I found out it compiles fine with the windows.d that comes with DMD, I'm using the one Andy Friesen posted awhile ago and all I changed in it was having HANDLE be void* instead of int. So it might be a problem with aliases? I did have a strange problem with aliases before. Something like this:

struct tagFOO
{
 int bla;
}
alias tagFOO FOO;
alias tagFOO* LPFOO;

In one case, using LPFOO thought it was a pointer to some other struct whereas FOO* worked fine (I was adding some Windows code before I found that nice windows.d from Andy Friesen).

It's a bug, I'll see about fixing it. -Walter