BLD: fix build issues with MSVC10 on Windows.  Closes gh-4245.

Note that there are a few similar patches posted to gh-4101 and gh-4245. Those were all patches to msvc9compiler in Python distutils. Monkeypatching ``MSVCCompiler.link`` is less easy than this change to ``config._check_compiler``; effect should be the same.

I don't have MSVC and TravisCI tests don't help here, so needs some manual testing. I'll ping some people who have had issues with this.
I think it would be better to put this block into a try..except
newer python versions will use newer compilers and fix the distutils issue we are working around
when this happens this could break