I have been using the following patch to fix the issue locally for a few weeks now (in addition to something equivalent to what Brian submitted for the _curses issue). These two patches combined give me a working python 2.7 on cygwin 1.7. I originally used something identical to Roumen's patch, but later started using the patch below after reading up on __declspec. Note that line 740 is also a candidate to be changed to dllexport, but I don't have the setup to test that.

Index: Include/pyport.h
===================================================================
--- Include/pyport.h    (revision 84288)
+++ Include/pyport.h    (working copy)
@@ -739,7 +739,7 @@
 #                       if !defined(__CYGWIN__)
 #                               define PyAPI_FUNC(RTYPE) __declspec(dllimport)
RTYPE
 #                       endif /* !__CYGWIN__ */
-#                       define PyAPI_DATA(RTYPE) extern __declspec(dllimport) RTYPE
+#                       define PyAPI_DATA(RTYPE) extern __declspec(dllexport) RTYPE
             /* module init functions outside the core must be exported */
 #                       if defined(__cplusplus)
 #                               define PyMODINIT_FUNC extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) void