and more cygwin

another little cygwin gem (pun intended): if your webrick starts but outputs nothing, and never binds to a port (going through the sources reveals that it just hangs in a backticks shell command call, but works fine if you run it standalone without any rails stuff or pass your server script webrick as an argument in command line); if you get bizarre memory relocation/unable to remap fatal errors when running rake, then try the following:

• shutdown/exit all your cygwin processes
• run ash from start/run (it is under bin\ash in your cygwin directory)
• then run rebaseall

this solved it for me. see this post for some details.

this cygwin/rails setup is a bundle of joy, i tell you. never a dull moment on these lovely long winter nights.