William Morgan wrote:
> I'd be surprised if Ruby allowed more than one thread to do a system()
> call at a time, Windows or not. Perhaps that would explain the behavior?
> If you fake those shell calls, do the symptoms persist?

I've been having similar issues. I have a ruby script which starts a 
DRuby server, then invokes VMWare which executes a ruby script which 
attempts to connect to the first ruby script.

I tried various approaches to starting VMWare in the background (using & 
in the command line, using Window's start command, etc), but nothing 
worked until I tried Cygwin's cygstart utility.

Ed Vander Hoek