Friends

I want to thank everyone who has responded – very helpful!

Thanks to your help I am making progress

· I re-installed msys64 from scratch, this time following the instructions on the GHC wiki rather than the msys2 page.  By doing update-core; then pacman -Su; then pacman -Su again, I got a clean install.   Very good!

Getting a shell between each step is tricky.

o The first shell is gotten with mingw64.bat

o After update-core, that file is gone; you have to use msys2_shell.cmd I think

o After pacman -Su we get mingw64.exe, which we can use thereafter.

· My slow-start problem appears to have gone away.   I adopted the fix from

you may be hitting a long standing issue some computers have in which the domain controller is being hit for every invocation of commands, causing a slowdown https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/138 , Solution 2 from https://gist.github.com/k-takata/9b8d143f0f3fef5abdab seems to fix it for most people.

I am not absolutely certain that was the problem, but things seem ok now.  I also excluded c:/msys64 from my antivirus check.

· Emacs too is now working normally.  Hurrah

So that’s all good.

Now I’m stuck on the windows tarballs download thing.  I get

configure: Checking for Windows toolchain tarballs...

configure: Extracting Windows toolchain from archives (may take a while)...

File not found - *.tar.xz

I tried both the things described on the wiki:

Pacman -R mingw-w64-x86_64-curl

error: target not found: mingw-w64-x86_64-curl

For the other I did the two mkdir things, and tried ./configure again, but got the same error message as above.

So I’m stuck again, but further forward.  Can you advise me?

Thanks!

Simon