>> That's just the service pack and it won't install unless you already have VS installed. There is no way (other than being an MSDN subscriber) to get VS 2008 at this point - I've checked.
>
> There is, but you have to know what to look for :-)

Fair enough, but I can't (as a Microsoft employee) endorse that link or guarantee that it won't go away :)

I still think it's worth fixing distutils to look in the right places for VC, since there are multiple ways of installing it that all include different batch files.