First, thank you for keeping these patches up to date.

- The patch for 2.5 is OK for me. We could just add the a paragraph that
appears in your patch for trunk (PC/VC6/readme.txt):
+_msi
+    _msi.c. You need to install Windows Installer SDK to build this module.

- I worked on your patch for trunk/ and py3k/ to allow compilation with
a stock VC6 *without* a modern PlatformSDK installed (i.e NTDDI_VERSION
is not defined)
This is relevant only for socketmodule; with a stock VC6, IPV6 is not
available, WSAIoctl is not exposed, and getaddrinfo() is emulated.

- Replacing _wstat with GetFileAttributesW is good thing: stat("nul")
says that the file exists!
But it is not enough: try to "import con" or "import nul", before and
after your patch. Fun in both cases (if you "import con", type some
chars, and press ^Z)

- The patches also work for VS8.0 (I just had to update the list of .c)

I will try to come with updated files, and test them with VS2003 Express
(VS7.1).