msvcrt isn't the right version, it just happens to load. It's actually an old, basically unsupported version.

The problem would seem to be that Python 2.7 does not activate its activation context before loading msvcrt90 via ctypes. Eryksun (nosied - hope you're the same one :) ) posted a comment on the SO post with a link to a separate answer that shows how to do it, but it would be better for MATLAB to embed the manifest in their host executable if they're going to load the DLL directly.

We could probably also condition uuid to not do that check on Windows, since I don't think those functions will ever exist, at least against 2.7 they won't.