spread 4.x, windows and python

Hi,

I see on the Spread homepage there is a Windows *8* Spread 4.4.0
package.  Is this backwards-compatible with older versions of Windows?

Furthermore, I am interested in cross-platform (Linux and Windows)
Spread development with Python.  Is there an easy way to accomplish
this?  We have an application that would need to be distributed
(internally), so ease of distribution/installation is necessary.

We currently do this with Java, and it's trivial to include spread.jar
with our application.  It there a similarly easy way to do it with
Python, e.g. distribute a .dll and a .py files?

Anyone gone down this road?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions,
Matt