Hello all,
It has been over 3 months, and three *coind.exe's later and finally fixing a bug in the MSVC windows version of the leveldb code, I can say that bitcoind.exe is a full, pure MSVC++ product (again?).
Much more to follow...
Ron
Interesting, keep us informed

C:\deps\boost_1_55_0>bootstrap.bat mingw
Building Boost.Build engine
'gcc' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Failed to build Boost.Build engine.
Please consult bootstrap.log for furter diagnostics.
You can try to obtain a prebuilt binary from
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7586&package_id=72941
Also, you can file an issue at http://svn.boost.org
Please attach bootstrap.log in that case.
C:\deps\boost_1_55_0>
Make sure mingw-builds is in path then check that your gcc -v output and the one specified at step 1.6 are the same.