Here's an option, though unfortunately not a trivial one:  use a private
build of the C runtime.  The Windows version of Firefox does this
(mozcrt19.dll).  The private CRT build doesn't use SxS in any way, so it
gets around this issue, as well as other issues like not allowing "for
me" installs on Vista (#4018).

For me to build the CRT from the source included with Visual Studio 2008
took some tweaking - apparently having the CRT source build properly out
of the box wasn't a priority for MS (the Mozilla CRT seems to be built
from the VS2005 source; perhaps that version is more cooperative).  It
does yield a CRT that links like an ordinary DLL, but the fact that it
can't be built without modifications is a major drawback to this solution.

Also, I'd assume that the CRT source isn't included in the Express
version (and possibly other ones), so that's a downside, too.

As far as Python itself, the project configurations would have to be
changed to define _CRT_NOFORCE_MANIFEST, suppress the default linking to
the stock CRT (/NODEFAULTLIB:msvcrt.lib), and link to the import library
for the private CRT.  I might try to create an experimental solution
config for this.