Current instructions at https://wiki.python.org/moin/WindowsCompilers for a number of items are insufficient to make things work out of the box.
This has lead to widespread confusion and a lot of vastly different and invariably hacky/unreliable/unmaintainable "alternative" guides on the Net (see e.g. the sheer volume of crappy advice at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2817869/error-unable-to-find-vcvarsall-bat and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4676728/value-error-trying-to-install-python-for-windows-extensions).

The first patch fixes that for SDKs 6.1,7.0,7.1 (details are in the patch's Subject).
The second one mentions VS Express' limitation that leads to an obscure error in distutils which resulted in https://bugs.python.org/issue7511 .

Unlike other (all?) instructions circling around the Net, these are NOT hacks and are intended to be official recommendations.

I tested them to work with 2.7 and 3.2 on an x32 with no prior development tools installed. I also checked other instructions applicable to these versions to be okay.

I didn't touch the ''mingw'' section because, according to https://bugs.python.org/issue4709 , it can't really be officially supported as it is now.