Re: [Haskell-cafe] borked windows environment, want to start over

Cygwin is fine for development - the shell is Bash (this can probably be changed), so it is much more capable than the MS shell. Personally I've never needed to uninstall Cygwin, if things get in a mess re-running the Cygwin installer seems to sort things out. One caveat is that if you want to build Haskell bindings to C libraries, MinGW+MSys is preferable to Cygwin. Cygwin shared libraries depend on the cygwin.dll which generally isn't what you want for bindings.