Cannot start bash prompts: processes intermittently don't die

[Popper, Samuel (US SSA)]

I'm running into a problem with a previously-working installation of
cygwin on Windows 2003 server.

I had installed a few extra packages, and updated all packages to the
latest while attempting to set up Tinderbox.  Now, I can no longer
reliably open a cygwin bash prompt.  The console window opens, but most
of the time (about 80%), the prompt never appears.  Using Sysinternal's
Process Explorer shows additional child process (run as part of the
default profile files) that haven't quite exited.  Killing those
processes causes the processing to continue and a prompt to appear. 

Another observation: the process shows up in the windows process lists
(e.g. task manager and process explorer) and also in the output of ps.
However, if I attempt to kill it from a bash prompt, kill reports "No
such process".

An alternate cygwin.bat that adds the -x parameter and runs bash under
strace seems to work more reliably, indicating some sort of race
condition.  I have an strace log, but ~500k is probably too large to
attach.
In this attempt to run cygwin.bat, the last line to print is:
"++ /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^_//'" (from line 83 of /etc/profile)

Just to be clear, this happens at a random command somewhere in profile,
or not at all.  It also happens intermittently when running shell
scripts from already-existing windows.

Thinking that the problem might have been with the latest versions of
cygwin, I tried to reinstall the original version (some packages
reconstructed from an equivalently old version from fruitbat.org) that
had been working for almost a year, but that did not help.

I can't think of anything else to try to debug this problem.  I
apologize if this has already come up before, but I was unsuccessful in
finding anything similar using google and searching the mailing lists.

Thanks for any help in figuring out this problem!

-Sam

PS Sorry if this gets posted more than once - my mail appears to be
getting silently dropped.

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