Sorry, I was focused on the fact that you don't need a manifest with VS 2010 and not that distutils was forcing you to have one when building an executable.

Either adding '/MANIFEST' as in paxan's patch (according to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fft52235.aspx, you need to specify it if you specify '/MANIFESTNAME') or removing the MANIFESTNAME specification entirely should be fine for 3.4 and later. I assume since nobody has complained about 2.7 that everything works fine there?