why is mintty trying to connect to google through my browser

[LMH <lmh_users-groups at molconn dot com>]

Hello,

I had an odd thing happen today. I opened a cygwin terminal to do something and got a
firewall alert that mintty was attempting to inject network traffic. I did a
temporary deny because there is no reason for mintty to make a connection based on
what I was doing and I have never seen that alert before (or I would have a firewall
rule already). That alert doesn't say where the connection would be made to if the
injection was allowed.

This temporary block seemed to break my seamonkey connection. My firewall log is full
of entries about blocked connections for seamonkey and the reason given is
"restricted parent process c:\cygwin\bin\mintty". I did not launch seamonkey using
mintty, so I have no idea why the firewall would see mintty as the parent process.
All of the seamonkey attempted connections to my email server were also blocked for
the same reason. When I closed the terminal, everything  went back to normal.

It seems like mintty tried to inject some network traffic to the seamonkey process
and for some reason, blocking this injection caused the firewall to block all traffic
from seamonkey.

Why would mintty try to inject network traffic to another process at startup? If it
needed ot connect for some reason, why would mintty try to make that connection
through another application instead of just making the connection itself?

I deleted any firewall rules for mintty and started the terminal again, but that does
not reproduce the situation at the moment.

I believe this is cygwin 2.3.1.

LMH

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