When you need to run a buildout under Windows, you have to take care of setting up quite a few things, like installing MinGW and linking it to Python, and setting up a svn command-line client for most buildouts.

We created a simple package that contains everything needed to make your windows buildout-friendly. It is a simple zip file that contains a batch script and third-party installers. When the batch is run, the environment variables are set as well, and win32-compatible buildouts should run without problems from there.

EDIT: the downloads urls have changed (thanks Sasha!)

You can get it here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3265240/python2.4.4-win32.zip

and another version that adds developing tools like vim and tail:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3265240/python2.4.4-win32-dev.zip

This zip file is built itself with a buildout that we might publish soon so you can make a custom zip file.