I'll note that in Numpy we have now worked around the issue (with https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/4892), basically by monkeypatching distutils and doing:

    if '/MANIFEST' not in ldflags:
        ldflags.append('/MANIFEST')

The bug report is still valid though; it should not be specific to numpy. A more detailed report of what was broken before and fixed by this patch would have been helpful. I cannot be sure that this is 100% correct because I don't have Windows+MSVC available, but it should be this:

- Take Python 3.4 installed from the python.org .exe installer
- Create a new virtualenv and activate it
- pip install numpy==1.8.0   # this will fail
- apply the patch
- pip install numpy==1.8.0   # this will work

Furthermore I think that this is a duplicate of http://bugs.python.org/issue4431, which is also a valid bug report confirmed by multiple people (but closed as "not a bug"). 

Given that applying the patch is harmless and not applying it clearly does create problems for users, it would make sense to apply it. But honestly, given for how long the bug reports on 4431 were ignored, I'm not willing to spend much effort on this. So if no one else does either, this issue may indeed just as well be closed as outdated like Marc Lawrence suggests.