Attempting to properly pull in boost as an external was an interesting experience. In the process, I discovered that the cp in msconfig is broken and that the gsoap external somehow depended on the broken behavior of the cp in msconfig. Now however an updated version of boost (not the latest because they decided to release 1.55.0 while I was trying to get the external working) is in and we can move onto trying to compile the Python bindings. Ticket #4022