I see there is no lack of awareness on this issue :-)
A couple of more comments: - Regarding cygwin1.dll side-by-side install issue. I do believe that if multiple different versions of CygWin could be installed side-by-side, this could improve stability of the applications. I use CygWin for different things and I don't want an upgrade to my X server to topple my arm-elf-gcc toolchain or vice versa. But as Alexander pointed out: this won't happen. - Regarding open-source GUI. Here is another alternative. Written in Java and compiled with w/GCJ + Eclipse SWT. This would result in a native windows executable with a Windows GUI and no dependencies on anything not shipping in Windows(not even msvcrt.dll or cygwin1.dll). GCJ comes w/CygWin. gcj -mno-cygwin -fjni -o hello.exe --main=HelloWorld swt_sans_awt.jar HelloWorld.java Øyvind