The windows distribution of python was compiled with Visual Studio 7.1, so you need the 7.1 runtime libraries on your computer to run python. I haven't tried compiling an app with VS2005, but I don't see why they would be incompatible. I've compiled a python app using VS 7.0 and it worked fine.
-Farshid -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
