Finally broke down and installed Visual Studio Express 2008 on my Vista partition of the work laptop.  It takes a GB on disk, bah.  Anyway, it worked as advertised, so whatever, I now have a Python 2.6+ compatible compiler and can use Mingw32 for Python 2.5, so no more need for the Toolkit stuff.

Interesting to note that the PyOpenGL-Demo "gears.py" test runs at 4000+ FPS on Win32 and only around 1700FPS on Linux.  I'm suspicious that we may have a measurement issue in how the FPS is calculated.  Some day I should rip the cProfile timer stuff out and make it a stand-alone module for performance-oriented measurements.

Other than the fact that the laptop properly suspends under Vista, I have no desire to use it.  Although I happily used Pythonwin as my editor for years, I find Eric way more productive now (though I suppose I could get Eric onto Win32 with some work).  The command line now feels foreign to me (though, again, I used it for years before I switched to Linux).  Most annoying thing, though, is the lack of package manager/software repository... I miss being able to say "aptitude install XXX" and have the system magically figure out how to find and install the software.

Ah well, it's not a bad system, I just don't like using it any more.