On May 12, 2016, at 8:35 AM, Ben Altman <ben...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have been using the same version of ksh for a while

Be specific.  *Which* version?

I can see from your cygcheck.out that you aren’t talking about mksh, the only 
ksh that ships with Cygwin.  Therefore, I assume you mean AT&T ksh93.  Which 
version did you come from, and which did you upgrade to?

Incidentally, please consider packaging ksh93u+ (stable) or ksh93v- (beta) for 
Cygwin.  It would be nice to have AT&T ksh for Cygwin, if only for reference 
and comparison purposes.  While doing compatibility testing with mksh, it’s 
hard to know if any given odd behavior is due to an mksh weirdness or if it’s 
accurately emulating AT&T ksh.

Relevant:

  http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/246338/is-the-shell-ksh93-dead

> did an update of cygwin

>From what version?  Or if you cannot be sure, about how long ago was your last 
>update?

I can see from your cygcheck.out that you are now on 1.7.35.  Did you read the 
release notes that strongly recommended that you to move /etc/passwd and 
/etc/group out of the way?  This is especially important in an AD-based 
organization like yours.

What is preventing you from becoming current?  (2.5.1)  I see in your message 
stuff about stuck postinstall scripts, but ipso facto, those are run *after* 
everything is installed, so that doesn’t explain it.

> One result is that everything takes many times longer to complete. E.g. "ls" 
> goes from under a second to give a listing to 20 or more seconds.

The usual way to find out what’s happening is to run the problem program under 
strace, then see where the strace output hangs.

Realize that this is not a general problem, so we’re going to be relying on you 
to do much of the debugging.

That said, I don’t think strace will help here, because I don’t think you 
actually have a Cygwin-specific problem.

> Another thing that happens is that Internet Explorer stops working - it loads 
> unresponsive and then crashes.

Cygwin cannot affect IE, nor vice versa.  The only thing that can affect both 
is the OS kernel or something that ties into it: hardware drivers, antimalware 
software, certain types of malware...

> Rebooting fixes the issue until I do something in one of my scripts that 
> triggers it again.

Are you certain about that?  I mean, if you can cause the problem within a day 
by running these scripts, have you tried running a whole day without running 
any of those scripts, but doing everything else you’d normally do in that day 
the same way?

I’ll bet that if you try that, you’ll find that the problem reoccurs anyway.

I see that you’re running Windows 7 Enterprise.  Doesn’t that get you a copy of 
HyperV and a license to run another copy of Windows within it?  Why not install 
a fresh copy of Windows and Cygwin in a HyperV VM, then see if it runs into the 
same problems?  I’ll bet it doesn’t, which will be interesting in its own 
right, plus it will let you get on with your work while you debug the actual 
problem out in the host environment.

> During the update that triggered this, it got stuck in the final part dealing 
> with the 0p_000_autorebase.dash script.

I’m not sure chasing this will have any effect.  If I am right that there is a 
3rd party agent outside of Cygwin causing the problem, any autorebase problems 
could well be a side effect of that agent’s behavior.  This sort of problem is 
generally classed as “BLODA” within Cygwin:

  https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda

Do you have any of those listed software packages installed?  Which ones?  Have 
you tried temporarily disabling or uninstalling them?

> I ran "cygcheck -s -v -r" and have attached the results (I replaced my 
> organization's name with aaa and similar though it probably wasn't necessary).

I also prefer to anonymize such data on general principles.

I can see that you’re in Ohio and possibly an employee of a nonprofit 
volunteer-based organization, however. :)

Incidentally, this message in your cygcheck.out says you should either remove 
or reinstall the Cygwin ping package:

Missing file: /usr/bin/ping.exe from package ping
ping                                  1.0.2-1            Incomplete

I suspect you installed it, found that it required admin privileges, then just 
removed the binary so that it would stop hiding the native Windows ping.exe.  
Better to remove the package in that case.
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