I'd like to make a bogus Windows window pop up asking the user to choose between energy settings (better performance vs. better energy savings). This is for a social psychological experiment about ecologically sustainable behavior, so it's completely legitimate; it's approved by an ethical board, and the participants will be debriefed about the nature of the deception afterward.

Now, I've done plenty of programming of experiments in python before (mostly using Tkinter), but I've never done anything deliberately designed to be so akin to native Windows. At the moment my plan is for it to be the first window that appears when they open the program, meaning that it will likely be asking about the program's own energy performance. Something like the following message, with two buttons:

Please choose the energy settings for this program.

[Better Energy Savings] [Better Performance]

Does anyone have experience here, or can you offer suggestions?

If you're looking for native-looking windows apps you'll want to go with wxPython. This is a Python class wrapper for the wx.widgets toolkit, which is cross-platform and extremely powerful.

There's a sticky in this forum with tons of examples of wx code. And here's where you can download the modules, as well as example code and find tutorials.