PIL for Win 7 64-bit Install Issues?

I ran into a bit of  a snag when trying to install PIL (Python Image Library) on my 64-bit Win 7 machine. I got errors with the installer saying things like “No Python dir found for 2.6″, so then I found some links on stack overflow that said to try manually creating a registry file and then that should work but it didn’t. I eventually stumbled (form this link) onto this site that has a bunch of “unoffical” realases of third party packages. They have a 32 and 64-bit version that is compiled and it WORKS! Installed fine, then rand idle and tried import Image and was successful and just to be sure I ran sys.path and sure enough the path to the new PIL lib was there.