Having taken Makeover's situation into account - to be on a platform they are more familiar with, to save costs, to host locally in Israel etc...

... it seems a bit of a pyrrhic victory to me...

Zencart will STILL require MySQL and PHP - you can't escape that. (If you want to work with a cart that's not php and MySQL, then you'll have to look at ASP perhaps, but a dbase of some sort is fundamental.)

You will be bugging your host every second day, asking them to re-set permissions (I'm thinking of define pages changes) and a host of other issues that will ratchet up costs anyway.

And then there's also the fact that zencart will "cuddle up" to linux far better than it will to a windows server.

You may find, in the longer term, that you'll spend more time and money on a windows box than your would otherwise...