A couple months ago, I was talking about my new Vista x64 not-yet-building box. It still doesn’t work yet, but I now have a clue or two as to what’s going on.

I applied the relevant parts of a patch for bug 418938, and I found I could at least launch bash. In doing a little extra searching, based on comment 12 of that bug, I found something very interesting…

Note SourceForge apparently puts most recent comments near the top. Note the comment dated 2007-11-03 19:44 in particular. That sounds exactly like the problem I’m facing.

I’ll haven’t finished trying the CygWin approach yet, for what it’s worth. I simply put it on the back burner for now. Updates as I get them (don’t expect edits to this post, though).