multi-window mode breaks USB drive auto-mount in Windows XP

[henry dot thorpe at att dot net]

I tried Googling netnews and the web, the Cygwin website, and the mailing lists, but haven't seen anything about this.

If I have Cygwin-X running in multi-window mode using this command in my startxwin.bat:

start XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -emulate3buttons 

and I plug in my external USB drive (a WD600), the drive isn't completely mounted according to Windows Explorer.  The drive doesn't show up under "My Computer", but I do see it under the "Safely Remove Hardware" tray icon, and I can CD in a command.com window to it.  But, it only accepts 8.3 style filenames in the command shell.

If I exit XWin, "safely remove" the drive, unplug the USB, and plug it back in, it mounts correctly, showing up in Explorer under "My Computer", supports proper FAT32 long filenames, etc. I can reliably reproduce this-- it's definitely a side effect of having XWin running.

I'm at a total loss for why this is happening, or even how it can happen... does XWin intercept the "disk mounted" message from the USB drivers to Explorer and the volume subsystem, and somehow not pass it on?

Note that this is on an HP nc6230 laptop, using just the built-in keyboard and trackpad (i.e., no external USB keyboard nor mouse).  And, it's not just the USB drive-- I see the same behaviour with USB dongles, USB MP3 players, my 3G iPod, etc.

Any suggestions on how to debug this, or any other insights will be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Henry

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