Cygwin setup.exe hangs during install Windows 8? How should I continue?

Question

So I have used Cygwin on and off for the past few years and I\'ve installed it a handful of times. However, I\'ve never experienced the install hanging during the install proce

Answer 1

Look out for BLODA (Big List Of Dodgy Apps.) and uninstall

BLODA - A list of applications that interfere with the normal working of Cygwin by intrusively injecting themselves in the system call chain

https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda

What applications have been found to interfere with Cygwin? >>>

From time to time, people have reported strange failures and problems in Cygwin and Cygwin packages that seem to have no rational explanation. Among the most common symptoms they report are fork failures, memory leaks, and file access denied problems. These problems, when they have been traced, often appear to be caused by interference from other software installed on the same PC. Security software, in particular, such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall applications, often implements its functions by installing hooks into various parts of the system, including both the Explorer shell and the underlying kernel. Sometimes these hooks are not implemented in an entirely transparent fashion, and cause changes in the behaviour which affect the operation of other programs, such as Cygwin.

Among the software that has been found to cause difficulties are:

AR Soft RAM Disk

ATI Catalyst (some versions)

AVAST (disable FILESYSTEM and BEHAVIOR realtime shields)

Avira AntiVir

BitDefender

Bufferzone from Trustware

ByteMobile laptop optimization client

COMODO Firewall Pro

Citrix Metaframe Presentation Server/XenApp (see Citrix Support page)

Credant Guardian Shield

Earthlink Total-Access

Forefront TMG

Google Desktop

Iolo System Mechanic/AntiVirus/Firewall

Kerio, Agnitum or ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall

LanDesk

Lavasoft Web Companion

Lenovo IPS Core Service (ipssvc)

Lenovo RapidBoot Shield

Logitech webcam software with "Logitech process monitor" service

MacType

NOD32 Antivirus

NVIDIA GeForce (some versions)

Norton/McAfee/Symantec antivirus or antispyware

PC Tools Spyware Doctor

Panda Internet Security

Sonic Solutions burning software containing DLA component (when DLA disabled)

Sophos Anti-Virus 7

Spybot S&D TeaTimer

Various programs by Wave Systems Corp using wxvault.dll, including Embassy Trust Suite and Embassy Security Center

Webroot Spy Sweeper with Antivirus

Windows Defender

Windows LiveOneCare

IBM Security Trusteer Rapport (see its home page

Sometimes these problems can be worked around, by temporarily or partially disabling the offending software. For instance, it may be possible to disable on-access scanning in your antivirus, or configure it to ignore files under the Cygwin installation root. Often, unfortunately, this is not possible; even disabling the software may not work, since many applications that hook the operating system leave their hooks installed when disabled, and simply set them into what is intended to be a completely transparent pass-through mode. Sometimes this pass-through is not as transparent as all that, and the hooks still interfere with Cygwin; in these cases, it may be necessary to uninstall the software altogether to restore normal operation.

Some of the symptoms you may experience are:

Random fork() failures

Caused by hook DLLs that load themselves into every process in the system. POSIX fork() semantics require that the memory map of the child process must be an exact duplicate of the parent process' layout. If one of these DLLs loads itself at a different base address in the child's memory space as compared to the address it was loaded at in the parent, it can end up taking the space that belonged to a different DLL in the parent. When Cygwin can't load the original DLL at that same address in the child, the fork() call has to fail.

File access problems

Some programs (e.g., virus scanners with on-access scanning) scan or otherwise operate on every file accessed by all the other software running on your computer. In some cases they may retain an open handle on the file even after the software that is really using the file has closed it. This has been known to cause operations such as deletes, renames and moves to fail with access denied errors. In extreme cases it has been known for scanners to leak file handles, leading to kernel memory starvation.

Networking issues

Firewall software sometimes gets a bit funny about Cygwin. It's not currently understood why; Cygwin only uses the standard Winsock2 API, but perhaps in some less-commonly used fashion that doesn't get as well tested by the publishers of firewalls. Symptoms include mysterious failures to connect, or corruption of network data being sent or received.

Memory and/or handle leaks

Some applications that hook into the Windows operating system exhibit bugs when interacting with Cygwin that cause them to leak allocated memory or other system resources. Symptoms include complaints about out-of-memory errors and even virtual memory exhaustion dialog boxes from the O/S; it is often possible to see the excess memory allocation using a tool such as Task Manager or Sysinternals' Process Explorer, although interpreting the statistics they present is not always straightforward owing to complications such as virtual memory paging and file caching.