I know there are quite a few posts on getting up and running with rpy2 on windows 7 32 bit. I have referenced a good number of them and attempted their solutions, including
With help from the comment above, I got moving in the proper direction. I created the R_HOME as a SYSTEM variable. That didn't work right away, as I was getting an R_USER not defined error.
To get everything the import above to work without error, I simply re-installed the rpy2 exectuable from here after defining the R_HOME. No errors.
In summary, key was o have R_HOME set PRIOR TO installing rpy2.