... all the willing help I've received - esp from Reid. I do appreciate you all taking the time to give me info and clues etc.
My conclusion is there is something on my system that prevents Xwin.exe and / or xterm.exe from completely initialising. I've removed most of the original text of this apend, as while I was closing down my stuff, I spotted something! >From FAQ << 7.6. Why does Cygwin/X freeze right after startup? Zone Alarm 5 is known to break Cygwin/X. As a result you'll see this line (or a similar) as last output in /tmp/XWin.log Rules = "xorg" Model = "pc101" Layout = "us" Variant = "(null)" Options = "(null)" Disabling Zone Alarm will not solve this problem. You can only uninstall Zone Alarm 5 and switch to an earlier version (4.5 is known to work) or use a different personal firewall. >> I found this, but it is NOT in the xwin.log. By chance this time, I had started xwin.exe in a cmd prompt and I could see the stdout messages. These are pretty much what's in the log, except for the last line! ==> Rules = "xorg" Model = "pc105" Layout = "gb" Variant = "(null)" Options = "(null)" So, I guess that's it - it's ZA, bless it. I can't not use it, so I guess I can't use Cygwin. Shame, I was getting quite fond of it. As a long shot, I'll see if I can find the ZA forum and ask / search. BTW, I discovered what is making cygwin run slowly - it is vsmon.exe that runs when ZoneAlarm anti-virus checking is on (it usually is) - as soon as any X-component starts the cpu consumption for vsmon rockets. Thanks again everyone ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- John Ormerod erebor limited -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/