for a game? It seems that using inheritance and maybe templates would be a great way to make a generic networking system, yet all the examples i see for writing winsock programs are in C++. Does anyone know where some good examples of a basic C++ network engines are, or perhaps have some tips on the best way to design a basic network object? Or is it best to stick with straight C for network programming?

One reason that you may only see C code examples for winsock, is that the winsock API is already fairly object oriented. To create a socket you call a constructor specifying it''s protocol, and boom you get a handle to a socket and you start calling functions on it. The functions you call are the same no matter what protocol you specified. That being said, it might be easier if you encapsulated the functions yourself in C++, but it would basically only aid your understanding of the code. I personally use C style socket calls exclusively.

Check out the Windows version of mAngband. It is open source, and uses UDP.