I've eventually discovered that MSYS2 pacman can deliver Win32 binaries of the very packages I was struggling to build.
(This is probably something that many others would have known ... but not those of us who are still living in the 1990's ;-)

So I'll settle for that for now.
Thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the noise. (I actually did learn quite a lot from this.)

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^4: [OT++] Seeking Win32 Python Wisdom by syphilis
in thread [OT++] Seeking Win32 Python Wisdom by syphilis

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