I recently received a request to get my rtmidi module working on windows, so i decided to try. The first problem I ran into was distutils complaining about not being set up to use the same compiler that python was built with. Considering I built my own python for work, I knew something was wrong. A little searching led me to the following patch by beaudrym:  http://bugs.python.org/issue1425482

Check out the attachments for the distutils config for VS 2005.