In the old days of DOS 3.1, an application could load a driver named ANSI.SYS which would provide functionality for manipulating the DOS console window to do things like setting a cursor position, clearing the screen, setting text colors and so forth. While you can still load ANSI.SYS to get that support in Windows XP, you then have to use COMMAND.COM rather than CMD.EXE as the shell and the program runs in a DOS emulation mode. But if you have a normal (to XP) win32 console application, it won't run under COMMAND.COM.
A guy at work needed to port an old DOS application to run on XP, and he asked how to set the cursor and such in a console window. Right off no one knew how to do it, so I did a little googling. There were lots of questions posted in various places about how to do cursor addressing in an XP console windows, but few answers. I finally found that in fact the WIN32 platform does support console manipulation in CMD.EXE that my coworker (and apparently others) were looking for. You can read all about it in the MSDN documentation. Open msdn.microsoft.com and in the search box and look for 'console functions'. The first 2 or 3 hits will get you there. Watch out that you use the 2000/XP functions and not the Windows 98 API which will show up in the search also.
I cobbled up a little windows XP cursor addressing library for my guy to use that contained the functions he cared about. If you need some simple cursor addressing and such, this will help out as a start.