David,
Your suggestion was exactly correct. It was a mysterious problem.. I
was was barking up the wrong tree thinking it was an extern C
problem.

I want to thank you for you excellent response! I was pulling my hair
out over this problem, and falling behind schedule as well.

Best Regards,
Ron
--- In boost@[...].. , David Abrahams <abrahams@[...]..>  wrote:
>  Ron,
> 
>  I'm not sure exactly what problem you're having, but if you're
making a
>  debug build under Win32, you may be running into the following
issue:
> 
>  Without special treatment, if _DEBUG is defined, #including
<python.h> 
>  causes you to make a special python debugging build of your code,
which
>  needs to be run under a special debugging version of python
(python_d.exe)
>  and use special debugging versions of the python DLL. Since most
people
>  don't get those components with a stock Python installation, I
disable the
>  special python debugging mode in Boost.Python by using
>  boost/python/detail/wrap_python.hpp instead of python.h directly
(python
>  debugging can be re-enabled with -DDEBUG_PYTHON). You should
probably be
>  #including wrap_python.hpp instead of python.h
>