sick version of GDB

[Adam Schlegel]

The new version of GDB broke for me when I updated to the latest net
release. The machine in question has been running Cygwin b20.1 for quite
a while now, but it was time for an update. Moving from b20 to 1.1.2 was
fairly smooth, once the b20-specific garbage had been cleaned up.
Unfortunately, I cannot get GDB 5.0 to work.

I tried to debug cat as an example of what's wrong. 

$ gdb -nw cat # or /bin/cat or C:/bin/cat.exe ...etc
< opening messages>

(gdb) run
Starting program: /bin/cat.exe 
gdb: unknown target exception 0x000006d1 at 0x77e89b01

Program received signal ?, Unknown signal.
0x77e89b01 in ?? ()

Obviously this is not normal behavior. If I try to continue, I get the
same exception, so I haven't made any progress. Unfortunately, this makes
it impossible to debug anything. I get a similar message when run from the
tcl/tk gui and from within Emacs.

Out of frustration, I restored my old version of GDB and it seemed to
work. This is temporary work-around, but it would be really nice to use
the latest version. Still, this problem makes me nervous. Unsolved
mysteries such as this can often hint at much larger problems.

What could cause something like this? What could cause the new version to
break, while not hurting the older version?

Attached are the output of cygcheck -s -v -r, and a GDB session which
recreates the problem, with some other info that may be useful.

Has anyone out there encountered this before?