I'm still somewhat confused as to why we're looking at this in the context of manually building an extension. It's *certainly* true that anyone attempting to build a Python extension by hand (as per Matthew Barnett's instructions) should be able and willing to build the import libraries by hand.

On the other hand, I've no *objection* to shipping the .a files (and I agree 100% that shipping a 64-bit library in a 32-bit installer is a bug). But if we do so, then we should be shipping whatever makes setup.py build_ext --compiler=mingw (i.e. distutils) happy. Distutils is the only way of building extensions that I think we should support (whether via shipping .a files, or in terms of how we handle any other bug reports).