Those instructions in section 5.4 do seem wrong.  On first reading they imply that you need to start with a clean source tree on your 32bit Windows, then build the 64bit version of Python.  So far so good.  However, then you need to run python.exe - which must be a 32bit version of Python or it wouldn't start.

So I *guess* the instructions really should say to build *both* the 32 and 64bit versions in the same source tree - in which case I can see why your patch would be necessary.

Can you confirm the process you used?  I assume you did build both versions in the same tree, but you also mentioned copying the .lib files around - was that an attempt to work around this bug?

But yeah, sorry for the distraction - given 5.4 I think this bug is probably valid, but the patch should probably include updated instructions in 5.4 to make it more clear.