I am glad that I am not the only one, it's making me consider another line of work. I get stuck badly and often for many months - much longer than the timescale

I am glad that I am not the only one, it's making me consider another line of work. I get stuck badly and often for many months - much longer than the timescales mentioned here, working on things that are beyond my basic level of ability and eventually having to give up if it's a solo effort or most recently have a more senior guy take over and finish the work. During this time I don't learn much. It's usually down to not having a crucial piece of information and being unable to determine what exactly isn't behaving as it should. On top of this, every other setback during the period that I'm stuck is magnified. Typically it tends to be cross platform stuff that works differently on different systems and one system, usually Windows, is holding me back. Perhaps the solution is to read Charles Petzold's Win32 programming book.