>(FWIW: The sad state of Windows is that almost every installer out there, MinGW included, means crapping in your system to some extent and never knowing what w

>(FWIW: The sad state of Windows is that almost every installer out there, MinGW included, means crapping in your system to some extent and never knowing what went on nor being able to removed all traces of what was installed. With each installed application you have to make a conscious decision whether it's worth the unpredictable OS pollution to install the application on a particular machine ... because you know with each install that your headed to that inevitable last one where you have to wipe the entire OS and start over.) This is a huge point, and a huge downside about Windows, even in recent versions. E.g. some time ago I installed some utility EXE and suddenly my Skype stopped working - in a really weird way - the UI itself changed, IIRC it did not show the login screen, though it did start the app. But could not use it since I had no way to log in. Had to roll back to a previous system save point or some such to undo the damage. The Windows registry (being a single point of failure [1], plus not getting cleaned out or updated completely (i.e. not all the registry keys getting updated) on installs/uninstalls due to buggy (un)installers), and DLL hell [2] are major causes for this. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell