Yes, this is a python question, and a serious one at that (moving to Win XP)

[Christopher Subich]

Chris Lambacher wrote:
> The shell that comes with MSys (from the MinGW guys). Is pretty good, although
> it does have a bit of a problem with stdout output before a process exits, ie
> it will hold back output until the process exits.
> 
> As a bonus, the file system is a little more sane, and if you are interested
> in compiling software that is not open source, you are not tied to the Cygwin
> DLL which is GPLed.

Worth mentioning here that cygwin's gcc does allow a -mno-cygwin 
compile-time flag to not link against the cygwin dll.  Cygwin's 
packaging system also includes the MinGW development libraries as an 
easily installable option, for compiling against mingw's stuff; I've 
done it for Python extensions, in fact.