Thanks Ken.

Running emacs with the -Q switch has shown me that this is an ELisp
problem with my init.el.  This is a problem on Cygwin but not on
ArchLinux (I synchronize this file accross all my Unix instances
including VM's).

The problem is this section, where, if I comment out adding the
Marmalade repository to the package manger, then 'list-packages works
oké, but of course, then I do not access all the repositories I want
when I use the packaging system:

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
            '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)
;; (add-to-list 'package-archives
;;            '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)
(package-initialize)

(defvar my-packages '(icicles
                      clojure-mode
                      cider
                      magit
                      rubocop
                      rspec-mode
                      el-spec
                      feature-mode
                      graphene
                      color-theme
                      password-generator
     dockerfile-mode))

(dolist (p my-packages)
  (when (not (package-installed-p p))
    (package-install p)))
(global-set-key (kbd "<f4>") 'list-packages)

I'm attaching the cygcheck.out file per instructions.

-- 
Matthew Eichler
matthew.eichler@aventinesolutions.nl
www.aventinesolutions.nl