I downloaded and ran setup, and it seemed to completed normally, but after it completed I didn’t have cygwin in my startup menu or a shortcut on my desktop, both of which I selected. The C:\cygwin does exist, with subdirectories under it. I execute c:\cygwin\bin\xterm. It flashed on the screen with an error message, but it was too quick to read. I have run cygwin before on XP without problems, but this is the first time with Win 7.
Is there some background process that needs to be running for cygwin to work? I am wondering if the installation is OK, but I am just missing the startup menu entry or desktop icon which starts a background process, or is there some path or registry entry I need to make.
The problem was I didn’t install as administrator. When I went back and re-installed as administrator, everything worked fine.