Yeah with Anaconda it's not as bad. But no-one told me that's what I needed if I wanted all the science packages to work on Windows... I'd never even heard of Anaconda before this. It took all of my blood and tears for weeks before I got everything fixed. So I guess what's wrong here is the lack of documentation.

NumPy/SciPy's install page tells you to use Anaconda (or equivalent) for Windows, and build from repositories for Linux.

http://www.scipy.org/install.html

Granted, it does not say "and by the way, when you do that you get tons of other great things like pandas, matplotlib, etc". But they are very clear about not trying to do this yourself.