... and noticed binutils versions are different (but you knew that)...

Yes ... I think I *did* know that at one stage, but then mistakenly brought up "mingw-runtime" in my earlier post.

When Jan Dubois said (in that p5p thread):
"I still don't understand how having -lmsvcrt in the link options could hurt though, even if it may be redundant"
then I knew it was time for me to stop even thinking about it :-)

More seriously, it would be nice to know if this is a MinGW bug or a perl bug. I'm inclined to think that it must be a MinGW bug because, as Jan said, it's hard to "understand how having -lmsvcrt in the link options could hurt". But I wouldn't like to file a bug report to the MinGW developers simply on the strength of this perl build failure ... and I know from past experience that I'm very good at misappropriating the blame :-)

Cheers,
Rob