My basic problem is that if I run GCC from the windows command line (cmd.exe in Windows XP) and it does nothing: no .o files are created, no error messages, nothing. It will only throw an error message if I use DOS-style paths, but nothing else. When I run from the Cygwin shell then it will throws error messages as appropriate for the errors in the source and produces the .o files as it needs. Using 'make' from the DOS command line doesn't work either. Has anyone encountered this behavior before?