I have no personal experience with Vista, but have you tried the troubleshooting advice at the bottom of the Vista installation wiki?
More particularly check the advice about adding paths to the "toolchain executables" and providing the full paths to each program.
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Trouble shooting
If this does not work out for you there is some advice to figure it out on your own:
* If there is a file not found by MinGW use your search function to look for it, and add it where it belongs
o If it's an executeable (.exe) add it to the "additional paths" under "toolchain executeables"
o If it's a header (.h, .hpp or without extension) add it to "compiler" under "search directories"
o If it's a library (.o, .a) add it to "linker" under "search directories"
* Compile with the -v flag. You can do this by simply adding -v to "Build options" -> "Compiler" -> "Other options"
* Try entering the complete path to each program (for example, changing "mingw32-g++.exe" to "D:\toolkits\MinGW513\bin\mingw32-g++.exe"). This may allow projects to be compiled, regardless of which partition and folder MinGW is installed to. See this forum thread for more details.
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... but I have my doubts:
These fixes may enable compilation, but depending on your version of MinGW, they may leave some issues with compilation and runtime errors as the Vista problem was a thorny issue with several ramifications.
An easy-to-install (and supposedly more complete) solution to the MinGW-Vista problem has been presented a couple of week ago by the maintainers of MAME. It may be advisable to uninstall your version of MinGW and install the MinGW package offered on
http://mamedev.org/tools/index.html instead. It uses the very recent GCC 4.2.1 port.
That version is said to contain the necessary fixes to allow MinGW to work on Vista. As it is the second version of these tools, it is likely to be a tried and tested version.
Once again, this information is only the result of searches on the net. It makes sense, but I have not tried it myself as I do not have access to Vista. Please tell us how you go.