Here at Linden Lab, I'm sometimes forced to make sure my code still works on Windows :P. Today I needed to install greenlet on Vista, and of course easy_install bailed since it requires Visual Studio 2003. As luck has it, 2003 doesn't work on Vista. I miss my shiny Ubuntu laptop!

The workaround I found with a little googling was to use MinGW to build the extension module.

1. Download http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/MinGW-5.1.4.exe and install it. Check g++ when asked to select components to install.
2. Create C:\Python25\Lib\distutils\distutils.cfg with the following contents

   [build]
   compiler = mingw32
   

3. Open a cmd shell and add C:\MinGW\bin to your path

   set PATH=C:\MinGW\bin;%PATH%

4. Install greenlet!

   C:\Python25\Scripts\easy_install.exe -U
   greenlet