mnooning,
If you can find someone with the 7.x version of the nmake.exe I would suggest that. You only need the executable and no other files. It is available from Microsoft in the MSVC toolkit if you can't find anyone. I do want to point out there are other alternatives as mentioned in this thread (dmake and MinGW).

I thought AS shipped with Tk? Even if it doesn't ship with the most up to date version, ppm should be able to find a precompiled version of what you want. That is of course if you are still unsuccessful at compiling it yourself.