"bash: /etc/profile: Permission denied" with a certain user

["Tim Largy" <tim dot largy at gmail dot com>]

I am having trouble running Cygwin as user X (not the real user name)
on a machine running Windows XP Professional SP2. I have no problem
whatsoever running Cygwin under different user accounts, both
Administrators and "Restricted" users, however when logged in as user
X and clicking on the Cygwin icon on my desktop, bash starts and
prints "bash: /etc/profile: Permission denied" and the shell is
useless because the environment isn't set up. What could be different
about user X? User X happens to be a "Restricted user," but as I've
mentioned, other restricted users on this machine have no problem
running Cygwin.

At first I thought I might have a problem with file permissions, so I
ran cacls.exe (the Windows utility) on every file in C:\cygwin, and
searched through the results for any mention of user X--I didn't find
any, and concluded that there is no ACE in any ACL on any file system
object in C:\cygwin that pertains to user X. (Question for Windows
experts: does cacls.exe tell the whole truth?) Also, using the Windows
control panel, I made user X a member of the Administrators group, and
still couldn't run Cygwin. This seems to rule out any problem with
NTFS file permissions.

Next I checked file permissions from Cygwin's perspective. In bash (as
a user who could run Cygwin, obviously) I ran "find /cygdrive/c/cygwin
-user X" to see if any files had any affiliation with user X. Didn't
find any. Also, inspecting /etc/group I verified that user X has the
same group as the other Restricted users who can run Cygwin. I
concluded that there aren't any files with permissions (from Cygwin's
perspective) treating user X differently than the other Restricted
users.

Next I wondered if user X didn't have the same rights (in Windows'
land) as the other Restricted users. Using Control Panel -> User
Accounts -> Advanced tab and inspecting the users and groups, there's
nothing special about user X. (Question for Windows experts: are there
any user rights that I can't observe using this tool? All accounts in
question are local rather than domain accounts, but this machine is
part of a domain.)

Next I checked user X's environment variables via Control Panel ->
System -> Advanced tab -> Environment Variables, but I didn't find
anything interesting. User X has the same variables as the other
Restricted users.

I'm out of ideas. How can running Cygwin be different for user X? What
should I look at next? I'm attaching the output of cygcheck.

Tim

Attachment: cygcheck-c.txt
Description: Text document

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