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Hi Eric,
Quick rundown: There are template 'exe' inside distutils/command. bdist_wininst appends to the template to build a customized installer.
First the 64 bit bug:
http://bugs.python.org/issue6792
With that bug active, I must be able to make 64 bit windows installers for users of 64 bit windows python to install my package. Unfortunately, the only 64 bit template is wininst-9.0-amd64.exe. Due to this bug, there is no way to use that installer, preventing one from creating universal windows installers on *nix, which bdist_wininst is supposed to allowed (per documentaiton).
Furthermore, I have empirically found that a 32-bit installer built against wininst-6.0 will not behave correctly either. Specifically, the pre-install-script I used would not execute. When I switched to the wininst-9.0 template, all worked fine.