If I understand Mark correctly, the MSVC 7 GUI doesn't pick up the enviroment vars itself - this is (one of?) the difficultiy I see.
Nope, this isn't a problem. I have 2 specific problems: * Manually setting LIB/INCLUDE has no effect, as distutils overwrites these values with what it thinks they should be * MSVC7 doesn't seem to store its paths in the registry. MSVC7's GUI probably doesn't pick up the LIB/INCLUDE vars at startup time - but this is rarely an issue - the only time I expect to set or use these vars is when running from the command-line (which is exactly where distutils is run from :) I think there is a simple fix to keep most people happy. distutils can just *append* the existing env var value to the new value. I think it is acceptable to say distutils wont let you set these to change the location of standard libraries or headers, but will let you add new ones. Mark.