This thread should probably be in the Game Programming board, but anyway...

I wouldn't really recomend OpenGL if you're just starting out. While you certainly can do 2D graphics with OpenGL, you pretty much have to do it in terms of 3D. You set the camera to an othogonal projection (i.e. no perspective) and then set up a quad primitive and texture map it. It takes quite a bit of work to get it all working, and you'll need to know a bit about 3d math, etc. A bit too complicated for someone just starting. On the other hand, it's the best way to go...just about any game that does 2D graphics these days will use this method.

I would recomend using the SDL library. It's easy to set up, and there's plenty of tutorials on getting started. Underneith the hood, it uses OpenGL and DirectDraw (on Windows), so you can use either of them without much hassle....no need to know how to create a window or how to do the complicated initialization. There's lots of addon libraries too, for things like adding networking capabilities. Here's the URL:

http://www.libsdl.org/index.php