Awesome post! The difficulty of building Python extensions on Win32 has been irritating me for years. I usually use the ActiveState distro, but msvccompiler.py doesn't seem to like my Visual Studio 2005 (and their distro is compiled with VC7, and compiling with two different VC's is aparently asking for trouble in the linker).

Anyway, I've kept my ActiveState, but now have a Cygwin just for building extensions. What kept me from doing this before was the worry about linking in cygwin, but your post showed how to avoid that, so thanks!