Cygwin window closes by itself -- And, a strange workaround

[surendar jeyadev <jeyadev3 at yahoo dot com>]

I have been using Cygwin for about 5 years on the same computer, without
a problem (but for a strange change in bash history behaviour about a few
months back -- more on that later, or in a separate thread). Suddenly,
today, something strange has started to happen. When I double click on
the Cygwin icon, a window opens (as usual), but it remains blank for about
10 seconds, after which is closes.

I have searched the archives and found a similar incident reported in Sep
2007, but no particular remedy was given. Also, I have found a very 
strange workaround.

I am running 

  CYGWIN_NT-5.1 visuma 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-05-26 20:37 i686 Cygwin

on a XP machine with SP3. The output of 'cygcheck -s -v -r' is
attached to this note.

I tried to invoke cygwin.bat from a command window as suggested in 
the 2007 replies to the query. The batch file runs and the prompt
changes to the cygwin bin directory. There are no error messages.

        C:\cygwin>cygwin.bat

        C:\cygwin\bin>

This is as expected as the contents of the batch file are just

         @echo off

         C:
         chdir C:\cygwin\bin

         bash --login -i

But, there is no window opened when I invoke cygwin.bat from the
command line (hint?).

Now for the strange workaround.

While trying to get a shell window I was clicking around and 
suddenly I noticed the Cygwin window with my usual prompt. Everything
appeared normal and I was able to do my usual tasks. I tried to 
repeat this, but success was intermittent till I found why. And this
is really weird! If I change focus away from the Cygwin window once
it opens, the shell seems to be correctly invoked. I can either change
focus to some other window or simply click on the background, as it
the trick works. If the focus remains in the Cygwin window, it closes
after about 10 seconds.

Any solutions/suggestion would be greatly appreciated. I can get the
bash shells going by monkeying around as described above, but I am not
sure if that is the way to work!

I think I will keep my question about bash history behaviour for another
note.

thanks
sj

Attachment: cygcheck.out
Description: Binary data

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