I seem to vaguely remember that MinGW was going to get its own CRT. And unless it does, MinGW is a defect compiler for legal resons. It cannot be legally used.
Microsoft has designated the CRT that MinGW links a system file, against which no application should link. Insted they have asked that a CRT is distributed together with any program that depends on it. If you program needs msvcrt.dll, you should redistribute msvcrt.dll and place a copy in your program's install directory. When you compile with MinGW, you are not allowed to to that. Microsof's CRTs can only be distributed with programs that are compiled with Microsoft's compilers. Even if you hold a license for Visual Studio, you are still not permitted to redistribute the CRT if you compiled your program with MinGW. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326922 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
