Hello,
Here is an update, in case anyone else runs into the same problem.
My understanding, is that the problem was caused by a mistake in the
"configure" script for the "network" package, which after (correctly)
detecting that IPv6 functionality was not available on my platform, it
(incorrectly) tried to "gain" this functionality by redefining the
version of my platform. Concretely, apparently I have "Windows Vista
Basic Home Edition", which seems to identify itself as version 0x400,
while the missing functions are only available on versions of windows
>= 0x501.
My workaround was to:
1. checkout the network package from the repository on code.haskell.com
2. modify configure.ac to comment out the section where it sets the
windows version to 0x501
3. autoreconf
4. build using the usual cabal way