The joys of Cygwin

So I was trying to install Cygwin on some servers (Windows 2000 and 2003) and it kept freezing up on the postinstall scripts. The program itself didn't lock up, it just seemed to stall out. I tried some Google searches to no avail (I did find a few others with the same problems, but no solutions were given).

At first I thought it was the version I was using, so I tried a slightly older version. That didn't help. I then took a look at the Task Manager while it was "frozen" and noticed that bash.exe was running. I tried killing the process, and the Cygwin setup moved on to the next postinstall script. Bingo!

I went ahead and did this for all of the scripts (killing off bash.exe every time it spawned) and it eventually finished. I then tried to run Cygwin and was greeted with a fatal error (I don't remember the exact verbiage). The suggested solution was to make sure I didn't have any other versions of the cygwin1.dll library laying around. Then it hit me. I had previously installed a stand alone version of rsyncd to use with BackupPC. After stopping the service and restarting the installer, it finally installed from start to finish without any trouble.

So if you are trying to install Cygwin, make sure you don't have ANY versions of the cygwin1.dll library laying around in a shared directory (like C:\WINDOWS\System32) OR any versions that are actively in use by a service (such as the stand alone version of rsyncd).