a path like //usr/local is treated as an UNC path.
this might leads to problems when an application is using //usr/local as
a normal "unix"-path.
i don't know how to overcome the problem, but one might think of a path
like /unc/computer/share instead of using the path //computer/share
what was the idea behind the current behaviour?
Do you think that Microsoft employees read this mailing list? I'm sure
that there are one or two but I doubt that they could speak definitively
about why Microsoft chose this behavior.
cygwin translates paths like /usr/local to c:\cygwin\usr\local and
manages mount-points etc...