I have Petzold & Stroustrup...
Petzold - GOOD! - This is considered the windows programming book. It's a good tutorial... You don't have to know anything about Windows programming to get started with this book. However, it's not really set-up as a "Teach Yourself" book. There aren't any questions or exercises. It is an excellent reference book too. You don't have to know alot of C++ to get started either... he uses C... Of course you can use the WinAPI functions with objects, the STL, or any other C++ shtuff.
If I understand how Windows works, killing the API would mean that no existing applications would run on the new OS.
Stroustrup - MIXED - It's like I'm reading a book on beginning brain surgery... and I don't have the medical/biology/physology background... Not for beginners! It's not that he's a bad writer, it just seems to be written for advanced computer science students. There is a lot of information in this book, and it's cool to have a book by the "creator" of C++. It's a good book to have in your library.
Myers - I don't have this book, but it is frequently recommended, as is "Thinking in C+" by Bruck Eckel. (Which I don't own either) I think you can download it free!
A couple of other non-book references -
You can download a copy of the ANSI C++ standard for about $20 from www.ansi.org. Of course, this is even harder to understand than Stroustrup, and it is difficult to find what you're looking for in a non-hyperlinked PDF file. (I haven't printed-it out... ~750 pages.)
And, Dinkumware.com has a complete reference of all the standard library functions which is free online, or about $20 for an HTML download.