Versions of "cygwin" up to 1.5.18-1 have worked just fine for me (Windows XP).
All later versions fail to work for me as follows:
o Attempts to list ("ls") network drives (Windows shares) fail with
"permission denied". My home folder is a network drive supported by SMB; this
is supported by a Unix server running TAS. Cygwin 1.5.18-1 and earlier work
just fine with CYGWIN=ntsec. I have tried all combinations of
"(no)ntsec"/"(no)smbntsec"/"(no)ntea" with later versions of Cygwin, but I
alwasy get "permission denied".
o Attempts to access removable drives (e.g. floppy, USB memory) behave
bizarrely. I either see "permission denied" or I see the raw device when I try
to list the contents. I discovered that unsetting "ntea" solves this problem,
perhaps because these external drives are FAT and not NTFS. But setting "ntea"
wasn't a problem until I progressed beyond Cygwin 1.5.18-1.
I can't find anything on the archives that seems to address this, and I've
exhausted all the things I can think of. Something significant seems to have
changed in Cygwin about six months ago. Any thoughts? Thanks!