Thank you for shedding light on the question. The problem is indeed with the .Xauthority file. I created a .Xauthority file with my recent install using setup. I had tried doing the same earlier when I did the installation using install.sh, but it turned out that the .Xauthority file was never created. If I delete the .Xauthority file from my recent install, I am able to ssh to a remote host and display results, just as before.
Now I decided to try xauth a bit further. I found interestingly that if I just ran the startx script from my linux box on cygwin Xfree-4.2.0, I could create succesfully a .Xauthority file, start the X server, and display results from a remote host via ssh, without adding xhost +localhost to my .xinitrc file. In other words, the same behaviour as starting the X server on linux is now obtained. I guess it works because mcookie is now part of cygutils. I hope my experience may be useful to others who want to set up the .Xauthority file. Raymond
