After some work I am happy to report successful compilation of a simple module using Python 2.0, distutils and mingw32. If somebody needs the libpython20.a, I have one which seems to work. find_config_files in dist.py needed a little tweaking to actually read pydistutils.cfg from sys.prefix as the doc string had promised. Incidentally I don't generally put the python DLLs in my path, but just the python executables. While most things work fine in this configuration, sys.prefix is not one of them. Is there a reason that MANIFEST.in isn't a default file to be included when making a source distribution? Reuben