Hi All,
  I'm alreading running nmake from the win32 subfolder. That's the only place it will run from to pickup the makefile. I tried an older version on nmake, but that made no difference. Looking at the output VC8 was telling me some function calls were depreciated, so I don't think it was working properly despite what it said.

So now I'm trying MinGW.

I downloaded the latest from:-
http://prdownloads.sf.net/mingw/MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe?download
And installed. I then grabbed the dmake suggested in the readme.win32 file:-
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/dmake-4.1pl1-win32.zip

Set up the PATH to use it and tried 'dmake'

It seemed to get quite far. There were a few warnings out data types but it kept going. Then it stopped with 'Cannot find BuildInfo.h' I checked and BuildInfo.h is in the source dir. So I copied it to the win32 subfolder, but then got an error 'perldll.i invalid string' or something like that.

So I then downloaded the gcc2.95.2 as suggest in the readme.win32
http://downloads.ActiveState.com/pub/staff/gsar/gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.zip

I reset the path and wipe and reunzipped the source files to get it all fresh.

Then when I tried dmake it didn't get very far, giving me this:-

del /f config.h<br>
copy config_H.gc config.h<br>
        1 file(s) copied.<br>
gcc -c -I.\include -I. -I.. -I..\lib\CORE -DWIN32 -DHAVE_DES_FCRYPT -D
+PERLDLL -DPERL_CORE -s -O2 -DPERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB -o.\mini\av.o ..\av.c
+<br>
In file included from win32thread.h:4,<br>
                 from ..\perl.h:2056,<br>
                 from ..\av.c:22:<br>
win32.h:314: warning: `struct _stati64' declared inside parameter list
+<br>
win32.h:314: warning: its scope is only this definition or declaration
+, which is probably not what you want.<br>
In file included from win32.h:549,<br>
                 from win32thread.h:4,<br>
                 from ..\perl.h:2056,<br>
                 from ..\av.c:22:<br>
win32iop.h:73: warning: `struct _stati64' declared inside parameter li
+st<br>
win32iop.h:74: warning: `struct _stati64' declared inside parameter li
+st<br>
win32iop.h:133: warning: `struct _stati64' declared inside parameter l
+ist<br>
win32iop.h:133: conflicting types for `win32_stat'<br>
win32iop.h:74: previous declaration of `win32_stat'<br>
In file included from ..\perl.h:3479,<br>
                 from ..\av.c:22:<br>
..\thrdvar.h:85: field `Tstatbuf' has incomplete type<br>
..\thrdvar.h:86: field `Tstatcache' has incomplete type<br>
dmake.exe:  Error code 1, while making '.\mini\av.o'<br>
[download]

Now I'm going to go back to trying the older compiler as it got further.