QEMU + MinGW-w64... working at last

OK... After finding the right combination, looks like this is possible after all.  So after looking at the gtk site, they mentioned some instabilities in gtk 2.24, and suggested backing up to 2.16, so I did.  Looking at some other posts, it is hinted at that in mingw, gcc 4.6 might be more stable than 4.7, so I down-reved that as well.  And finally, it sounded like qemu 1.4.1 did have some issues with disk IO so I upgraded my source referece to 1.5.0.  Below is the psuedo code of what I did.

msys=msys+7za+wget+svn+git+mercurial+cvs-rev13.7z
mingw=\
i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-4.6.3-2-release-win32_rubenvb.7z
gtk=gtk+-bundle_2.16.6-20100912_win32.zip
sdl=SDL-devel-1.2.15-mingw32.tar.gz
qemu=qemu-1.5.0.tar.bz2
img=linux-0.2.img.bz2
cd /tmp && wget $msys && 7za x $msys && mv msys C:/
cmd /c c:/msys/msys.bat
..
==
 copy following to .profile c:\msys\home\%USERNAME%
 or from c:\msys\msys.bat shell just do:
==
mkdir /usr/local/src; mkdir /usr/local/bld
cd /tmp && wget $mingw && 7za x $mingw && mv mingw32 C:/
cd /usr/local && wget $gtk && 7za x $gtk
cd /usr/local/src && wget $sdl && tar -xvzf $sdl
cd /usr/local/src && wget $qemu && tar -xvjf $qemu
cd /usr/local/bld && wget $img && bzip2 -d $img
echo C:/mingw32 /mingw > /etc/fstab && mount
cd /usr/local/src/SDL-1.2.15 && make native
cd /usr/local/src/qemu-1.5.0
./configure \
  --python=c:/Python26/python \
  --target-list=i386-softmmu \
  --prefix=/usr/local/bld \
  --cc=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc \
  --host-cc=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc \
  --objcc=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc \
  --extra-cflags="-I/usr/local/include" \
  --extra-ldflags="-L/usr/local/lib"
make install && cd /usr/local/bld
qemu-system-i386 linux-0.2.img

With the above settings, the test image works and seems pretty solid.  So the possible combinations and moving pieces are as follows:

GCC Versions {4.5, 4,6, 4,7}

First I tried 4.5 which is the old MinGW product.  That caused access violations, so I moved up to 4.7.  This was through the Mingw-w64 project, and I picked "Ruben's" build.  That seem to work pretty well, but I had read about some others issues with instability on 4.7 and the thought that this might be too "bleeding edge".  I finally settled on Ruben's Mingw-w64 build of 4.6 and all seems well.

GTK+ Versions {2.16, 2.24}

I may have been over-cautious here.  I started at v2.24 for win32.  This seemed to work, but I was unclear where my issues were.  As I began to research GTK stability questions, I found that for win64 version 2.16 is, in may cases, considered the most stable.  Choosing the side of caution, I back-reved my win32 versioin to 2.16 as well.

QEMU Version {1.4.1, 1.5.0}

Originally I had always been working on 1.4.1 thinking that it would be more stable.  I got good builds, but disk-io was always very slow.  After posting to the mailing list, it was revealed that slow disk-io is a known issue of 1.4.1.  Under good counsel I up-reved my source tree to 1.5.0.  This seems to produce good solid builds and will be where I baseline from.