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From: "Dave Korn" <dk AT artimi DOT com>
To: "'Cygwin List'" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: A vexing installation problem
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 17:50:29 -0000
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner On Behalf Of David Hinds
> Sent: 30 November 2004 17:08

> On Tue, 30 Nov, 2004 at 01:38:39PM -0000, Dave Korn wrote:
> >
> > I reckon you most likely have faulty hardware in there somewhere
> 
> Err, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this heavily used system which
> has worked perfectly for several years, would have faulty hardware
> that specifically dislikes cygwin1.dll version 1.5.6 and later, but is
> otherwise symptomless.

  Well, I suppose so, but subtle and borderline hardware failures can have
ever such bizarre, transient, and unpredictable consequences (cf. memory
timing issues and Sig11 failures at times of heavy stress
http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/) that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility just
on those grounds.  I once used to have a PC that had some slightly dodgy
hardware in it; but it worked fine for almost everything I did with it, and
the only thing that ever went wrong is it would often bomb out while
building a gcc cross-compiler.  The fact that something has been working
previously can't be taken as evidence to discount the suggestion that it may
have just broken down, since everything that ever breaks down was previously
working!

  But I guess it's less likely in your case, since you really can roll the
dll forward and backward and have the failure appear or disappear.  It was
that comment about how the shell manages to work once every in a while that
I found suggestive.  Here's another couple of WAGs:

  Have you got any kind of anti-virus or firewall software on that machine?
Some of it is known to play badly with cygwin; it might be worth disabling
it temporarily and seeing if that helps.

  For that, have you conceivably got some kind of virus, trojan, or
spy/adware infestation?  I don't know off the top of my head if the cygwin
dll needs to initialise the winsock library but one of those dodgy LSPs
could perhaps cause early failure like that.

  Finally, I noticed "SESSIONNAME = `RDP-Tcp#1'" in the environment
variables from your cygcheck output.  Does that mean you're using Terminal
Server to log in?  What happens when you try running all this at the actual
keyboard?

    cheers, 
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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