Any chance you're running a 32 bit application on 64 bit Vista? It seems that the 32 bit layer in Vista 64 has at least one bug/feature that is not present, ie: works ;-), in the 32 bit subsystem (WOW64) in XP/2003 64. If you use Msys/Mingw this manifests as a crash/error in some of the shell programs, although it appears the bug was originally "found" by the Cygwin folks: This thread (http://lists-archives.org/mingw-users/05977-msys-and-vista-64.html) has a patch from Cygwin. The issue is some change in parameter handling on the CreateProcess call in the Vista WOW64 layer, but I wonder if there are other WOW64 bugs lurking in there. If you're not running 64 bit don't worry on this particular point, but if you are it might be worth testing to see if it is happy on "native" 32 bit Vista or XP/2k3 64 bit. -- modified at 13:56 Wednesday 28th March, 2007