Hello Sam,
> Here's my goal: I want to run ocamlopt and have a binary executable 
> for my project on Windows and be able to give it to my friend and have 
> it run; this would rule out Cygwin, since I'd need extra .dll files.  
> I don't want that, so I wanted to go ahead and download one of the 
> other OCaml binary installables (MSVC or MinGW).  However, I tried 
> both, and I keep getting the same error:
>
>>> ocamlopt -o geomancian figures.ml geomancian.ml
>>
>> 'as' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable
>> program or batch file.
>> File "figures.ml", line 1, characters 0-1:
>> Error: Assembler error, input left in file <directory
>> omitted>\camlasme1fe97.s
Ocamlopt is looking for the assembler, i.e. 'as' command. Looks like the 
binutils is missing on the target machine. You can get it from:
    
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435&package_id=11290&release_id=19108

The Ocaml download page for binary distribution for Microsoft Windows at:
     http://caml.inria.fr/download.en.html
mentions that, some features require the Cygwin environment (for MinGW) 
and similar for MSVC.

I'm curious to find out whether it would work with just a mingw-msys 
installation, without using Cygwin. Waiting for the download to finish 
on my machine.

Best regards,

Shailesh S. Khandekar,
Pune.