Recently I've found that configure has started to fail horribly often
(i.e. most of the time) because of an inability to create conftest.exe,
and I know that other people have been having issues with configure
failing too.
Previously we've been blaming antivirus software and/or Windows Search
for doing this, but I've already tried turning them off to no avail.
Annoyingly Processs Monitor has the effect of slowing down configure
sufficiently to make the problem intermittent, but I've been catching
the netsvcs service opening a handle to conftest.exe with delete
sharing, so that although rm thinks that it's removed conftest.exe
Windows is still waiting for netsvcs to close it before it really goes
away and the next one can be created.
Most of the services hosted by netsvcs look mundane but the Application
Compatibility service looked suspicious, so I tried to stop it.
This was a bad move as this service controls the UAC prompts, so I was
unable to launch Process Monitor, but the configure completed anyway,
which was a good sign.
After rebooting my PC I then researched the service and found that it
contains several components, some of which can be disabled. In
particular I have tried disabling the Application Compatibility Engine
and the Program Compatibility Assistant through gpedit.msc
(Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Application Compatibility)
and so far have not had any problems running configure.
Apparently these settings can also increase the chances of success of an
rm -rf of a large folder.
There is a way to exclude the Program Compatibility Assistant on a
case-by-case basis but this would either require that conftest.exe
always be linked with a limited user manifest (tricky as this would need
to apply to third-party configures) or that all possible paths to
conftest.exe be listed in the registry (you would need to cover all
subconfigures in all objdirs).
As yet I have not tried disabling the two compatibility settings
separately to see which one is responsible, or whether both are needed.
--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.
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