I keep hearing this meme but I use node on Windows and don't have any issues with this. You have to have Visual Studio and Python installed, but most of us have that anyway.

Which node modules are problem children?

We had a lot of issues with sqlite.

What version of VS did you need? Some of the information on getting gyp working was like VS2008 SP1, plus the Win7.1 SDK.

If this is no longer true, I'll give it a whirl.

I had the same trouble (used SQLLite for RoR), i think it was my 64 bit version of Win7, which gave the most problems (some compiling errors).

A lot has been mentioned on the internet (how to fix it), but none seemed to work. I even recompiled everything :(

I use VS2013 with it and it works great.

EE?

I'm using Ultimate (was that the question?)

yeah, express edition is the easiest for most non MSDN folks to get.

I had trouble with bcrypt

Same, my problem was with a project that contained bcrypt in a node js project (fetched it from GitHub and NodeJS in Visual Studio didn't succeed at importing bcrypt for some reason).

I think it was the Ghost project (the blogging platform), that used bcrypt. (i hope you guys of NodeJS Tools read this, because it was the reason i didn't use it and used my Raspberry PI as an alternative :) )

Our project uses bcrypt as well, and could not easily be npm'd on Windows.

I'm surprisingly finding myself in the opposite situation. Since my app is hosted by Azure, there's some Windows only npm modules I need to work with (such as azurecache[0]). They are just thin wrappers on top of .NET libs.

[0] -- https://github.com/tjanczuk/azurecache

Sometimes packages look for a specific install of VS. To set it to the installed version try:

`npm install <module> -msvs_version=2013`

Hasn't this been solved by node-pre-gyp already?