[FoRK] Sudden increase in Windows flakiness??

[Stephen D. Williams]

Has anyone else noticed particularly frequent problems with Windows lately?

I have a long-used WindowXP workstation and a fresh install of Vista 64 
with just a few basic applications installed.

They are both blue screening constantly, perhaps twice at day at least.
The Vista box has some strangeness that I've never seen before, and 
didn't see originally:
 From an initial Cygwin bash shell, when I try to start X windows, it 
only starts after a few tries.  Inside the first xterm, invariably, the 
first several times I try to start another xterm, it says:

$       3 [main] xterm 3384 child_copy: linked dll data write copy 
failed, 0x9D9000..0x9DCF40, done 0, windows pid 3404, Win32 error 998
xterm: Error 29, errno 11: Resource temporarily unavailable
Reason: spawn: fork() failed

After pausing for a few seconds, it works fine.  Bizarre.
Extensive googling found nothing related.

I've cycled through RAM dimms on the Vista box, made sure the RAM 
frequency was right, etc.  There's no obvious connection.

I've noticed bad Windows patches before, but it seems a little unlikely 
they would screw up XP and Vista 64 at the same time.

In other news, my uber Mac Pro arrived today...

sdw