Building gtk for Win32/gdk-pixbuf problem

[Damon Register <damon w register lmco com>]

I have recently been trying to build a gtk stack on a Win32 platform.  I am
currently using mingw/msys for this.  Part of the motivation for this effort
is that the gtkmm all in one installer I was using is now rather outdated.

With a little effort and Google I was able to find what components I needed.
I got as far as building gdk-pixbuf where I hit a roadblock.  During the make
process gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders.exe crashes.  From what I could determine so
far, the problem seems to be within query_module() in queryloaders.c when
resources are freed.

I tried Google but didn't come up with anything about this issue that I could
use.  I tried compiling with debug so I could use gdb but perhaps I didn't do
something right because doesn't stop at the crash.  This got me interested
in the possibility of building with MSVC 2010 since I have that.

I spent some time looking over messages from this list.  It wasn't until then
that I realized from an old post that Tor no longer maintains the win32 build.
I guess I am really behind if I didn't know that until now.  If I am understanding
these posts correctly, it looks like there has been some success with
mingw and MSVC.  Now I have a few questions for those who have had success
in this area.

1.  For mingw what is the favored way to build?  Manually, script, etc.?  I
    did find some scripts from Tor that I am really struggling to understand.

2.  Has anyone run into trouble with gdk-pixbuf especially with
    gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders.exe?

3.  Kean Johnston posted that he did the MSVC build with only command tools
    and not makefiles.  How is this done?

4.  I suppose there isn't a nice set of project files and a master solution?

Damon Register