Thanks so much Steve I got it working right away!

I peeked into the bdist_wininst.py and saw that it also depended on some local exe files.  Copied both of those to the embedded and everything worked like a charm.  I did read the documentation previously so I thought the only real dependency was the C Runtime.  Working on a network without any net access I have to bring in libraries we version, so basically what you describe "vendoring".

If you have time to answer I would like to understand why this particular item is not part of the embedded.  Or why is it in the regular install by default?  When I look at the distutils documentation there is very little information about this file.  Is this particular item a 3rd party not core python or?  In any case thanks for the help again.