Lots of compatibility changes for python2.4 and mingw32 compilers.
gcc has strtoll available, and does the wrong thing if you use _strtoi64 (it implicitly defines it to return an 'int' which isn't a 64-bit integer.)
Further, python2.4 doesn't support the %lu syntax, only having %ld and %d. So we go back to casting everything into real python objects and then stringifying them, but only for python 2.4.