I've just tried rust beta2 on a fresh Windows7 VM, and at least the "hello world" app compiles and runs without any issues.

Would you mind filing a bug about this? (with as much configuration details as possible). Thanks!

You should be able to use any [reasonably recent] MinGW environment with 0.9. Is this not the case?

[edit] You do need to install gcc in your MinGW, though.

I do not know, but if I recall correctly there was an issue with 0.8 where the - then current - MinGW installer would grab packages incompatible with the Rust 0.8 binaries so you first had to setup the current version of MinGW, and then use MinGW's own package manager to rollback to a version compatible with the Rust build.

This had been fixed since. You should be able to use mingw without rolling back anything.