<p>I started trying to play with Mono, mostly for fun at the moment.  I first tried to use the Visual Studio plugin that will convert a csproj into a makefile, but there seemed to be no version available for Visual Studio 2005. I also read about the MonoDevelop IDE, which sounded nice. Unfortunately, there's no pre-fab Windows package for it. I tried to follow some instructions to build it by combining dependencies from other semi-related installs. It didn't work, but that's probably because I'm a Windows-oriented guy and can barely spell "makefile".</p>

<p>So, my question is this: What's the lowest-energy way to get up and running to try some Mono-based development on Windows?</p>

@Chris I have found that Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing against .NET -- I think the best way to target Mono is really just to develop and build in Visual Studio under Windows then just run those binaries directly on Linux (or whatever other Mono platform you are using).  There are free versions of Visual Studio if licensing is a concern.  If you are developing under Linux, the best software is probably Eclipse with a Mono plugin (see
The Mono Handbook - Eclipse
for installation instructions) but keep in mind it doesn't have near the amount of features or language integration Visual Studio has.
@modesty Mono is a 3rd party open source implementation of the .NET framework which allows you to run .NET applications on platforms other than Windows.