I was hoping that this would fix a problem observed in the initial 8.2.0 build where it wouldn't run on Windows XP due to a missing import in kernel32.dll GetTickCount64. A web search revealed that mingw32's libpthread was updated to only run on Vista and above, so I hoped that this would fix the compatibility problem. It did not, but since it also didn't introduce any build breaks, it seems better to leave it out of the build.
