Q: octave crashes on start-up.

[George Barrick]

                      2009.12.10.13:18:31 UT

Hello octave folks,

      My octave crashes on start-up.  I'm
running a pre-compiled octave-3.2.3 that uses
gnuplot-4.2-4 under cygwin-1.7.0-68 in
WinXP SP3.

      The octave was doing well up until early
December, and I have done no upgrades in the
recent past.  The gnuplot-4.2-4 seems to be
working well.  The cygwin group have been
actively updating some things in preparation
for the release of cygwin-1.7beta as cygwin-1.7.1
in the near future.

      I have (of course) gone through the exercise
of tearing out all of my octave packages, and
then re-installing them to see whether this will
help.  No dice.

      I figure that it is some of the cygwin-stuff
that has broken octave, but I need to be very
specific about what is broken when I communicate
with the cygwin forum.  All that I really have for
diagnostic purposes is the core that is dumped by
octave when it crashes.  I've pasted that in
below.

      My question is: Can anyone who reads this
either give me pointers on a method for snagging
some output that will help me debug the situation?
Alternatively, is there anyone who can interpret
the information from the core dump well enough to
indicate what is going wrong when I start octave?
Note that it crashes in the same way whether I
start it from a text-only terminal or an xterm.

Thank you,
George                   address@hidden

<file: octave-3.2.3.exe.stackdump>
Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION at eip=6C4E8010
eax=61147000 ebx=66C8E508 ecx=6C4E8010
      edx=FFFFFFFF esi=006767E8 edi=6115DFEB
ebp=0022CCF8 esp=0022CCDC
      program=D:\cygwin\bin\octave-3.2.3.exe, pid 2592, thread main
cs=001B ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003B gs=0000 ss=0023
Stack trace:
Frame     Function  Args
0022CCF8  6C4E8010  (00000008, 00000000, 00000043, 6F2156E8)
0022CD18  6694C8BE  (66C8E508, 66BAE2B7, 0022CD38, 66381041)
0022CD38  667A8F76  (00000001, 61211EC4, 612105E7, 610204B0)
0022CDA8  610203C3  (00000000, 0022CDE0, 610066E0, 7FFDF000)
End of stack trace
</file>