I was having trouble convincing distutils to see the
directories I had set in the Visual Studio 7
user-interface.  Looking in the registry, I noticed
that although the registry entry existed and had the
"default" set of directories, the new directories I
specified in the GUI were not written to this registry key.

Further investigation shows that Visual Studio is
storing these preferences in a VCComponents.dat file
under "Application Data\Local Settings\Microsoft...". 
This file is in a format that ConfigParser can
understand :)

I have attached a patch for msvccompiler to handle
this, but it relies on win32all to locate the "Local
Settings" directory.