cygwin bash path completion performance issue after WinXP patches. Any suggestion?

Question

The OS is WinXP SP3.

Here is my cygwin dll info:

   Cygwin DLL version info:
       DLL version: 1.7.5
       DLL epoch: 19
       DLL old termios: 5
       DLL malloc env: 28
       Cygwin conv: 181
       API major: 0
       API minor: 225
       Shared data: 5
       DLL identifier: cygwin1
       Mount registry: 3
       Cygwin registry name: Cygwin
       Program options name: Program Options
       Installations name: Installations
       Cygdrive default prefix:
       Build date:
       Shared id: cygwin1S5

Since latest round of Windows patches, the path completion has been slowed down significantly (may take a second or two for the prompt to come back).

The patches applied are

KB980373
KB981716/MSACCESS
KB981716/ACCWIZ

Anyone has any idea/suggestion to fix the performance issue?

Answer 1

The problem is bash-completion, unfortunately. I recently installed bash-completion on a cygwin 1.7.7 system (Win7x64) and bash startup time went from 1 second to 35 seconds. Using Sysinternals Process Monitor I can see bash-completion doing a scan of just about every potentially executable file (at least open/close) in the Windows directory and Program Files. The only solution is to disable it or uninstall it; this page provides more information