Crash running Cygwin bash shell under XEmacs

[Mike Alexander]

I had a need to run something on my Windows machine today which 
required a newer version of Cygwin than the ancient one that was 
installed there.  After I upgraded to the current version (1.7.9) I 
can't start a shell in XEmacs (via M-X shell) using Cygwin's version of 
bash.  When I try to do so I get

Process bash.exe exited abnormally with code 35584
      3 [sig] bash 1168 exception::handle: Exception: 
STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
   1556 [sig] bash 1168 open_stackdumpfile: Dumping stack trace to 
bash.exe.stackdump

The stack dump is uninteresting except that the crash happens at offset 
0x169220 in cygwin1.dll.  It appears that this crash happens very early 
on, before it's read /etc/profile.  I see that I also have similar 
stack dumps from other programs (find.exe and xargs.exe) in the XEmacs 
directory all exactly the same.

I installed the latest Windows version of XEmacs from the installer at 
<http://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/binaries/win32/InnoSetup/XEmacs_Setup_21.5.29.exe> 
and tried starting it with --vanilla.  This didn't make any difference. 
I also did a clean install of Cygwin 1.7.9 in case there was any crud 
left around from the old version.  This also didn't help.  I'm running 
on an old Dell with Windows XP Professional SP3.  Perhaps that's the 
problem.  I probably should install Windows on my Mac under one of the 
emulators, but that's more than I want to get into right now.

I've Googled around a bit and although others have seen this problem, 
none of the solutions (mostly involving changing ownership of Cygwin 
files and running rebaseall) did any good.  The bash shell runs fine 
when I start it using the .bat file installed by Cygwin, so it's 
basically working, but it won't run in an XEmacs shell window.

Has anyone else seen this or know how to fix it?  This little episode 
reminds me why I avoid using Windows, but sometimes it's necessary.

         Mike