At the time of writing, Iostreams from CVS head still does not build on Windows XP, due to missing header files. The build starts with these comments: ****************************************************** Building Boost.Iostreams with bzip2 support disabled. HINT: define the environment variable BZIP2_SOURCE to point to the root directy of your bzip2 installation if you have one. For more options, consult the Boost.Iostreams documentation ****************************************************** ****************************************************** Building Boost.Iostreams with zlib and gzip support disabled. HINT: define the environment variable BZIP2_SOURCE to point to the root directy of your zlib installation if you have one. For more options, consult the Boost.Iostreams documentation ****************************************************** Presumably "BZIP2_SOURCE" should not effect both types of compression, and "directy" is a typo. Anyway, the following errors are then reported 8 times each: bzip2.cpp(14) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'bzlib.h': No such file or directory zlib.cpp(14) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'zlib.h': No such file or directory The command line I used for the build was: bjam -sTOOLS=vc-8_0 -sICU_PATH=F:\Dev\icu-3.2 -sPYTHON_ROOT=C:\Apps\Python24 -sPYTHON_VERSION=2.4