Simple and effective web framework
Use plain old ASP. IIS does not care where files are stored. All paths can be set relative from the virtual directory. That means you can include "/myproject/myfile.asp", whereas in PHP it's often done using relative paths. Global.asa then contains global configuration for the application. You hardly ever have to worry about relative paths in the code. 
In PHP you'd have include(dirname(FILE) . '/../../myfile.php") which is of course fugly. The only 'solution' I found for this is making HTML files and then using SSI (server side includes).
The only downside to ASP is the availability, since it has to run on Windows. But ASP files just run, and there's not complex Linux configuration to worry about. The language VBScript is extremely simple, but you can also choose to write server side JavaScript, since you're familiar with C.
I'm looking for a suitable cross-platform web framework (if that's the proper term). I need something that doesn't rely on knowing the server's address or the absolute path to the files. Ideally it would come with a (development) server and be widely supported.
I've already tried PHP, Django and web2py. Django had an admin panel, required too much information (like server's address or ip) and felt unpleasant to work with; PHP had chown and chmod conflicts with the server (the code couldn't access uploaded files or vice versa) and couldn't handle urls properly; web2py crashed upon compiling and the manual didn't cover that -- not to mention it required using the admin panel. Python is probably the way to go, but even the amount of different web frameworks and distributions for Python is too much for me to install and test individually.
What I need is a simple and effective cross-platform web development language that works pretty much anywhere. No useless admin panels, no fancy user interfaces, no databases (necessarily), no restrictions like users/access/levels and certainly no "Web 2.0" crap (for I hate that retronym). Just an all-powerful file and request parser.
I'm used to programming in C and other low level languages, so difficulty is not a problem.