I think one of the tested machines is Vista RTM, though it's been
updated. I also tried of Vista x32 SP1 and it fails there.
If non-admin installs can't be made to work, I agree that the "for me"
option be dropped and the installer changed to invoke UAC. I looked for
a solution to this, but so far can't find any -- and this would also
mean that .pyd files in site-packages and elsewhere would need .manifest
files that contain the path to where msvcr90.dll is located. I think
requiring an admin install might cause problems for py2exe though.
This is rather important because it means that python is unusable using
the default installation options and I suspect that many users won't
know how to install for everyone.
I'd still like to see the need to depend on a C runtime dll dropped at
some point in the future, but I know that it's not an easy thing to do.