Suggested patches
I downloaded the latest version of gmsh from svn, tried to build on windows using VC++ 2005, and ran into a few problems.
The first is that inttypes.h is not included with the compiler. However, downloading a version of this from the web and pointing to it directly solved this problem.
Also ran into various other minor compilation problems and I don't think any of them are due to a peculiarity of VC++. I've attached a tar file with my changed versions.
I also made a few small fixes for abaqus inp file export. I replaced some invalid element names with the correct abaqus element names.