Thanks Thomas Wolff, L A Walsh and Brian Inglis for your responses. I
am trying to cover the most important parts in this one message to
prevent the email chain from branching.

On 2019-03-20  L A Walsh wrote:
>     Have you tried running with 'strace' to see what calls it executes?:
>
> strace -f ./hello

Thanks, that was helpful. A dialog titled "hello.exe - Application
Error" appeared, saying
"The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b).
Click OK to close the application." The  console contained the following output:

$ strace -f ./hello
--- Process 10312 created
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\ntdll.dll at 00007ffd63290000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll at 00000000779f0000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\wow64.dll at 0000000077910000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\wow64win.dll at 0000000077970000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\kernel32.dll at 00000000000d0000
--- Process 10312 unloaded DLL at 00000000000d0000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\SysWOW64\kernel32.dll at 0000000074db0000
--- Process 10312 unloaded DLL at 0000000074db0000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\user32.dll at 0000000000630000
--- Process 10312 unloaded DLL at 0000000000630000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\System32\wow64cpu.dll at 0000000077900000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\SysWOW64\kernel32.dll at 0000000074db0000
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Windows\SysWOW64\KernelBase.dll at 0000000077710000
--- Process 10312 thread 24044 created
--- Process 10312 loaded C:\Users\XXXXXX\cygwin64\bin\cygwin1.dll at
0000000000ae0000
--- Process 10312 unloaded DLL at 0000000000ae0000
--- Process 10312 thread 24044 exited with status 0x0
--- Process 10312 exited with status 0xc000007b


(Replaced a sensitive string with "XXXXXX" there.)

> Rather than describing what you did, copy and paste a shell transcript showing
> the commands and output from you listing the source code, compiling and running
> it, a long listing of the directory contents, then run
>
>         "cygcheck -hrsv > cygcheck.out"
>
> and attach the output as a text file to a post to this list, as explained below
> under Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html.

I included a modified version of cygcheck.out. Mostly sensitive letter
sequences have been
replaced by 6 X's: "XXXXXX".  And user groups in was all replaced by
"/// User group names and numbers omitted ///"

Vesa