Git is essential to my workflow. I run MSYS Git on Windows XP on my quad core machine with 3GB of RAM, and normally it is responsive and zippy.

Suddenly an issue has cropped up whereby it takes >30 seconds to run any command from the Git Bash command prompt, including ls or cd. Interestingly, from the bash prompt it looks likes ls runs fairly quickly, I can then see the output from ls, but it then takes ~30 seconds for the prompt to return. If I switch to the windows command prompt (by running cmd from the start menu) git related commands also take forever, even just to run. For example git status can take close to a minute before anything happens. Sometimes the processes simply don't finish.

Note that I have "MSYS Git" installed as well as regular "MSYS" for things like MinGW and make.

I believe the problem is related to sh.exe located in C:\Program Files\Git\bin. When I run ls from the bash prompt, or when I invoke git from the windows prompt, task manager shows up to four instances of sh.exe processes that come and go.

Here I am waiting for ls to return and you can see the task manager has git.exe running and four instances of sh.exe:

If I ctrl-c in the middle of an ls I sometimes get errors that include:

sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
      0 [main] sh.exe" 1624 proc_subproc: Couldn't duplicate my handle<0x6FC> fo
r pid 6052, Win32 error 5
sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Or for git status: $ git status

sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
sh.exe": fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Can I fix this so that git runs quickly again, and if so how?

Things I have tried:

• Reboot
• Upgrade MSYS Git to most recent version & Reboot
• Upgrade MSYS to most recent version & Reboot
• Uninstall MSYS & uninstall and reinstall MSYS Git alone & Reboot

I'd very much like to not wipe my box and reinstall Windows, but I will if I can't get this fixed. I can no longer code if it takes me >30 s to run git status or cd.