FAQ Troubleshoot

Here are some common questions and solutions contributed by our users, to help troubleshoot the installation.

1. On Windows with Visual Studio 2008, why does build fail with 'basetsd.h' file not found error?
2. On Windows with Visual Studio 2008, how do I manually set the target compiler environment?

On Windows with Visual Studio 2008, why does build fail with 'basetsd.h' file not found error?

If you get the following error, then the Visual Studio 2008 environment is not correctly setup.

C:\Python27\include\pyconfig.h(227) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'basetsd.h': No such file or directory

You'll need to manually define the INCLUDE and LIB environment variables:

INCLUDE=“C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Include”
LIB=“C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Lib”

This problem was seen when user had multiple Visual Studio IDEs installed so the environment was set up for the newer version.

On Windows with Visual Studio 2008, how do I manually set the target compiler environment?

cd to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC" and run

> vcvarsall x86 

Again, this problem was seen if user couldn't start with clean 32-bit install of [Python 2.7.5] (http://www.python.org/download/). In this case, there might be a python install with distutils that is perhaps configured for a 64-bit environment.