Yes, I've seen that, thank you.
I tried moving MingW to the root level (D:\MingW), the source to compile is on the same partition, tried compiling using CodeBlocks, MSys, tried swapping the '\' characters to '/' in the PATH env. variable, tried prefixing the toolchain executables with full path (d:\MinGW\bin\mingw32-g++.exe and d:/MinGW/bin/mingw32-g++.exe) but it still complains about a missing .o file. I also tried applying a small patch I found
here but that didn't help either.
I'm sure I did something wrong since nobody else seems to have this problem but I just can't seem to find what that was.