[PyQt] How do you compile 64bit PyQt on Windows w/o Visual Studio.

[Brian Knudson]

I'm trying to compile 64bit PyQt on Windows 7. (I am a commercial customer, so I have to build PyQt, AFAIK).  I've downloaded MinGW & had good success getting SIP compiled, but I couldn't compile PyQt.  I deduce that this is because I have 64bit Python with a 32bit MinGW & the libs aren't matching.  Fair enough, now I've downloaded & installed (read: unpacked) MinGW64, but I have 2 big questions:

1. Short of editing all the makfiles to use "x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++.exe" rather than "g++" for the compiler, is there a way to tell the configure step to use the 64bit MinGW?  I see that the standard build toolchain often takes --host, but that doesn't seem to be the case for sip or pyqt.  There also doesn't seem to be a platform options for mingw64.
2. (Possibly more important).  When I compiled the 32bit version of sip with MinGW, I needed to make a libpython26.a from python26.dll.  I say "needed" as the python libs weren't found during compile (causing it to fail) and my research lead me to this necessity.  After putting libpython26.a in place, the build completed successfully (I actually found a libpython26.a available for download as my attempts to build one failed due to word-size mismatch).    The pexporter I've attempted to recompile pexporter using mingw64's g++, but it segfaults when I try to run it on the 64bit python26.dll.  With that:
 2.a. Is it necessary to create a libpython26.a to compile with mingw's g++ on Windows?  If not, what's the other way of doing it?  If so, are there any good instructions for making it?
 2.b. How does one do this for 64bit python26.dll?

I'm not stuck on MinGW, but would love to do this w/o using Visual Studio.  Open to suggestion.  I have a license of VS2005, fwiw, and will use that if it will make life easier, but would rather not if I can help it.  I am a neophyte when it comes to Visual Studio - I'm not really sure how to even start with that - searching the help for "makefile" didn't bring up anything useful.

Thanks,
-Brian