I’ve been getting recurrent problems with the ssh service on cygwin. It was crashing with a wierd fork, malloc style error that I just had no chance of debugging. It’s been causing me real grief. sshfs has stopped working, unison has had problems. But it’s only been intermittent, so I never got around to fixing it.

Today, I did the google thing. And the cause? Think hard, have a guess, I promise you will be surprised.

My web cam drivers. Of course, I hid the critical information from you — I have attached a device from Logitech to my machine; I’ve ranted about logitech before, but this one takes the biscuit. They really do make some of the worse software known to man. I mean, how are you supposed to figure this one out? Hmmm, a key component of my secure networking is causing problems; what can it be? Perhaps, it’s my webcam software.

Uninstalled their QuickCam disaster. The webcam still works. So far, no ssh problems at all.

Originally published on my old blog site.