My VS6 install on XP didn't set the 
r"Software\Microsoft\Devstudio\6.0\Build System" 
registry key relied upon by distutils.msvccompiler to find 
the compiler and linker executable. 

As a backup to the registry paths, this patch looks up 
the MSVCDIR environment variable and ensures its 
basename is appropriate for the Python build version: 

            if self.__version == 6: 
                matchbase = 'vc98'
            elif self.__version == 7: 
                matchbase = 'vc7'

Works fine on my machine, so long as I run 
VCVARS32.BAT, and fails appropriately if I ran the wrong 
VCVARS32.BAT by mistake (I have Visual Studio Net 
2003 also installed). 

The patch should be applied to distutils/msvccompiler.py.

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Whups. The patch didn't attach. 

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I've desired the same functionality in the past.

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WARNING: the first patch contains a typo. s/nstring/string/ 
and you'll be fine. New version attached. 

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I'm curious, though, how you installed VS6 without getting
the registry settings. Doesn't this mean your installation
of VS6 is broken?

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Having come across this problem myself, it seems that MSVC 6
doesn't create the r"Software\Microsoft\Devstudio\6.0\Build
System" registry keys until *after* you run the actual
Visual Studio IDE.  So just doing a plain install and never
running the IDE isn't enough.

This isn't much of a fix, just some kind of documentation
incase it bites some other fumbling developer in the future.

Someone somewhere else
(http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=451285&group_id=5470)
 suggested using the Environment Variables as well as the
registry keys in distutils to check for compiler
correctness.  Seems like a plan to me. 

And there is some more chat about this problem here
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=305470&aid=614770&group_id=5470

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The reliance on registry keys (and ignoring other environment variables) can also cause other headaches.  Here's a problem I ran into on a stock Python 2.3 when trying to compile extensions using VC6:

I'm using STLport instead of the buggy STL implementation that ships with VC6.  To have the STL headers included I put the STL directory at the beginning of the INCLUDE search path in VCVARS32.BAT *and* by setting the appropriate values in the environment variables.  

With these settings, when I built my Python C++ extension by hand everything worked hunky-dory.  However when I tried to use distutils it kept including the old header files.  It took me a good 20 minutes of head scratching to realize that distutils was ignoring my environment variables and preferentially grabbing whatever INCLUDE directory was specified in the registry key (even if I ran VCVARS32.bat before compiling). Once I set the registry variable by hand, everything worked ok.

Perhaps distutils can be configured to look for environment settings *before* searching out whatever is buried in the registry?

--Paul M.

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As Python 2.3 is no longer maintained, and Python 2.4 (and
later) uses VS 2003, I'm rejecting the patch as out-of-date.