Re: emacs won't start interactively

[Joe Trivers via help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

[I hope "Re:" in the subject line does the Right Thing.]

From:Óscar Fuentes

> What's the exit code of emacs?
>
> emacs.exe -nw
> echo %errorlevel%

1

> If, on the command line, you set PATH to the bare minimum
> (c:\windows\system32) and then run emacs.exe, does it work?

Same result.

> You can try installing Dependencies [1] and see if there is some missing
> dll or a mismatch.

It shows a _lot_ of dependencies, 81  lines in the Module subwindow. They're all in or under C:\Windows\system32, near as I can tell. Not sure how to find incompatible ones. All are shown as Machine: AMD64. Many are api-ms-win-core-*.dll -> C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll or kernelbase.dll or powrprof.dll or sechost.dll or a few other ones.

I installed enough of MinGW to get gdb going, and then noticed it appears to be 32-bit only so I re-unpacked the emacs-26.2-i686 zip that I tried the first time. It, too, exits immediately when I run bin\emacs.exe or runemacs.exe. I ran emacs.exe with gdb and gave it an "r" command, hoping for a stack trace when something broke. To my astonishment, emacs popped up in a window and looked perfect.

Very interesting, I thought. I tried to run the 64-bit emacs.exe with gdb but it said it didn't recognize the format of the executable.

I then installed mingw-w64 and ran the 64-bit emacs-26.1.exe with that gdb, and it also produced a perfectly cromulent emacs window. So apparently whatever goes wrong is cured by running under gdb.

Any further thoughts about what might be happening here? And on how gdb could be making it work correctly?

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