frequently getting a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION exception under win7

[Yuval Emek <yuval dot emek at gmail dot com>]

A very annoying situation: I'm getting a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
exception in about 2 out of 3 operations performed under cygwin/x. An
operation in this context can be starting an x application (e.g.,
xterm) or running some command from within emacs (e.g., diff or
latex).

In attempt to isolate the problem, I reinstalled cygwin from scratch
using the default settings of setup.exe + xorg-server, xinit,
xorg-docs, and X-start-menu-icons.
Next, I open a cygwin bash window and then invoke startxwin.exe .
The x-server is invoked but an xterm window does not open and the
following message appears:

***message begins***
      4 [main] xterm 7156 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
   1449 [main] xterm 7156 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      4 [main] xterm 7996 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
   1356 [main] xterm 7996 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      4 [main] xterm 5268 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
    647 [main] xterm 5268 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      5 [main] xterm 4316 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
    739 [main] xterm 4316 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      2 [main] xterm 2752 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
   1123 [main] xterm 2752 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      5 [main] xterm 3220 exception::handle: Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
   1260 [main] xterm 3220 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to xterm.exe.s
tackdump
      6 [main] xterm 6752 fork: child -1 - died waiting for longjmp before initi
alization, retry 0, exit code 0x600, errno 11
xterm: Error 29, errno 11: Resource temporarily unavailable
Reason: spawn: fork() failed
***message ends***

The content of the resulting xterm.exe.stackdump file:

***content begins***
Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION at eip=610202F7
eax=00C500F8 ebx=612294A4 ecx=755F783F edx=002620F0 esi=00000000 edi=0022FA14
ebp=61020A10 esp=0022C7E4 program=C:\cygwin\bin\xterm.exe, pid 3220, thread main

cs=001B ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003B gs=0000 ss=0023
Stack trace:
Frame     Function  Args
End of stack trace
***content ends***

This phenomenon (or a similar one where I'm getting only 1 or two
lines of the exception and xterm does open) is very common: it happens
in about 2 out of 3 startxwin.exe invocation attempts. The same thing
happens when I'm trying to open a new xterm window from an existing
one.

I'm using Windows 7 (32 bits). This is probably a relevant info as my
old laptop (with Windows XP) works fine (once again with a fresh
installation of cygwin + cygwin/x).

I'm somewhat surprised that this problem was not reported before since
I know that my office mate suffers from it as well (she is also using
Windows 7 32 bits).

I've already tried to discuss this problem in the cygwin mailing list
(see http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2010-04/msg00740.html) without a
positive resolution. Thinking about it some more, I now understand
that this problem occurs only under x, so I hope that this is the
right mailing list.

Any suggestions?

The output of cygcheck -s -v -r and the content of /var/log/XWin.0.log
are attached.

Attachment: XWin.0.log
Description: Binary data

Attachment: xterm.exe.stackdump
Description: Binary data

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