windows side-by-side configuration woes on windows HPC

[Nick Touran]

Copying my local copy of Python 2.6 to a Windows HPC 2008 system is giving
dll side-by-side configuration errors for some third-party packages
(matplotlib, pyMSSQL, in particular). I understand that there is a tradition
of Python supporting XCOPY deployment, and would really like to be able to
just copy my C:\python26 folder to the network drive and have it run on the
server.

I got around a related issue (http://bugs.python.org/issue4566) just by
upgrading to 2.6.3 and was able to import socket and mpi4py and everything,
except matplotlib and pyMSSQL, that is.

I also understand that if I were to install the MS Visual Studio 2008
redistribution package on the server that everything would be fine because
the modules just can't find the proper C run-time DLL. The problem with that
is two-fold: I don't have admin rights on the machine and there are over
1000 machines on the cluster and I don't think the admin is going to install
that on all of them.

So is there any way to set an environmental variable or something to get
these packages to know where to find the proper msvcr90.dll, akin to setting
LD_LIBRARY_PATH in Linux? Is there another solution?

Thanks in advance.
-Nick
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