I was trying to do some remote bugsquashing by SSHing on a Windows computer running the Cygwin sshd. It's a clean Cygwin ruby setup, with the minimum required for Rails, and the SQLite3 Driver compiled with gcc 3.4.4 (cygming special), which seems to fallback to the DL driver after I hacked api.rb to recognize cygwin as a host. Whatever Rails is doing to connect to the database, it threw a can't open exception or some such. I then tried to recreate that in "irb", and got this weird beaviour: (I edited some gruesome gemspec dum spam from the log) irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems' => true irb(main):002:0> 'require require 'sqlite3' => false irb(main):003:0> require 'irb/omp completion' => true irb(main):004:0> require 'pp' => true irb(main):005:0> pp SQLite3. ::Database.new ' 'production.sqlitwe e3' #<SQLite3::Database:0x661fce0 closed=false, driver=#<SQLite3::Driver::DL::Driver:0x693f480>, gempath_searcher= #< ... >, handle=#<DL::PtrData:0x0x102a2430 ptr=0x0x6803430 size=0 free=0x0x0>, results_as_hash=false, statement_factory=SQLite3::Statement, translator=nil, type_translation=false> => nil irb(main):006:0> quit I didn't test if this DB handle actually worked. The next ones I created in another session looked perfectly normal. Is this just a really, really weird coinkydink related to my obscure setup where some DLLs seem to clash and cause strange interpreter states, or can it be considered a proper bug in one of the parties involved? David Vallner