compiling python source code under VC8

["Martin v. Löwis"]

>  I am trying to build python from scratch under VC8. The build process
> runs and completes succesfully in debug mode resulting in
> python_d.exe. But when i try to run this exe it returns an assertion
> error and application crashes.

What Python version are you trying to compile? This sounds like Python
2.4 and earlier. Microsoft has broken compatibility with standard C in
VS 2005, in a way that breaks Python on startup. In Python 2.5, a
work-around was added.

Regards,
Martin