Work around setuptools issue #1902

Work around setuptools issue #1902

Added a workaround for a setuptools-related failure that has been observed
as occurring on Windows installations, where setuptools is not correctly
reporting a build error when the MSVC build dependencies are not installed
and therefore not allowing graceful degradation into non C extensions
builds.

Setuptools issue https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/1902

Fixes: #4967
Change-Id: I5e21e7e78cb6d927b18afce64cacf8643b98354e
(cherry picked from commit 4a2dd4902a1168234f14bdd0634728086d53c406)