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What about Python built with mingw? I don't think that's 
possible right now, but I'd expect people to work on it. And 
I've no idea what sys.version for that would be.

The only real cases are likely to be MSVC 7.1 (Python 2.4, 
binary dist), MSVC 6 (Python <= 2.3, binary dist) and hand-
built Python versions. The patch does the right thing for all 
the binary distributions, which are the ones where the user 
can't be assumed to know how to hack things to make them 
work.

For hand-built versions, the user can do "python setup.py 
build_ext --compiler=mingw32 -l msvcr71" (or whatever) to 
manually specify the runtime to use. Leaving the default as 
msvcrt (the CRT that comes with the OS, and is default for 
mingw) seems right - and better than aborting (particularly as 
I'm not sure how to check whether there's an -l option for 
the CRT specified by the user).

The best I could do is effectively to force build_ext to fail 
unless Python was built with MSVC, which seems unhelpful...