ActiveState's
ppm allows other repositories to draw on as well as their own. Try them. Your environment has problems with
mingw? Sounds like a sign of something else wrong--- check into it. Perhaps your attitude about windows is blinding you to existing solutions? There is a free version of Microsoft C++ you might look at. Keep in mind that even if the compiler issue goes away, things are not necessarily even between 'nix and Windows. There are modules that just won't work on windows (I don't know about the other way around...) The bigger the app, the more the modules the larger you problem space is going to be.
--hsm
"Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."