Eric, I'm assuming you are the key decision maker for any fix. As I want to see this issue stay razor focused, where specifically do you need community help?
Depending upon your needs, I can test on my win7 32bit notebook with official python 2.7.3. It also has arch 3.7.9 and ubuntu server 12.10 virtualbox vm's. I don't build python from source with mingw and my win8 64bit box isn't ready yet. The win7 box has mingw gcc 4.6.2 32bit and mingw-w64 32bit toolchains, both of which have msys and autohell goodies. I'm swamped these days but will carve out time from somewhere.