I didn't have a copy of depends.exe since it doesn't appear to come with
MinGW.  System is basically VirtualBox VM with fresh install of XP Pro
SP2, upgraded to SP3 and TortoiseSVN, Firefox, Xemacs, MinGW and Python
versions installed.

I found a GUI program named depends which is what I used to figure out
that the issue appeared to be localtime() missing in msvcr90.dll.  BTW
did you notice msg69367 and the attached file that shows the problem in
a trivial test case?

The gui depends program found the following issues:

- No localtime in msvcr90.dll
- DWMAPI.DLL not found (not mentioned on link line so no idea why
depends wants it)
- MPR.DLL & SHLWAPI.DLL are red but I don't know why (again not
mentioned on link line)

I think that the localtime() symbol is the underlying cause.  However
this isn't exactly Python's fault (Python's headers don't do anything to
the localtime symbol but there may be defines that cause "secure crt" to
be used which wants localtime_s to be used instead).  Maybe MinGW is
supposed to be redefining localtime to one of the _/32/64/s variants but
isn't.

In any event the net result is that if a Python extension uses current
MinGW and localtime() then it will compile and link correctly on Python
2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6b1 & 3.0b1.  However it won't run on 2.6b1 or 3.0b1
due to some sort of mismatch between those versions of Python using new
MSVC runtime and/or MinGW.