I have quite a complex setup, with a "path" folder stored under %userprofile%/Dropbox/encrypted/dirlinks/path, and symlinked to %userprofile%/encrypted/dirlinks/path and %userprofile%/path. I also have ConEmu installed.

I only added %userprofile%/path to my PATH variable, while building in Visual Studio.

When I copy clcache.exe to cl.exe and execute it, it enters infinite recursion, unless:

1. %CD% current directory does not contain cl.exe.
2. %PATH% contains the normalized path to path folder, and not a path to that folder, but containing symlinks along the way.

If 2 is not true, findCompilerBinary() returns the wrong path since myExecutablePath() (sys.executable.upper()) differs from path.upper() (from %PATH%), even if cl.exe is the same file, accessed via different symlinks.

If 1 is not true, I don't know what's wrong since I don't know how to debug py2exe programs.

I could set CLCACHE_CL, but the default folder differs by host and EXE architecture, making me feel somewhat uncomfortable about setting it up (hard-coded to match one VS project and configuration).

Maybe you should use os.path.realpath(...) or Path.resolve() to normalize paths, to fix 2. I'm not sure if that will fix 1.