So there seem to be a few options for alternative consoles, but of course, Vista 64 sucks hard enough in the compatability area that there isn’t a single good solution.

Console2 -The error case on this one is weird. It starts the internal shell up just fine, but due to a Vista drawing issue, it doesn’t actually draw text to the screen. The bug (feature?) is limited to 64 bit versions of windows, and looks like it hits XP64 as well. Either way, if you can’t see what you’re typing, or the response, the terminal isn’t very useful.

PuttyCyg - again, doesn’t work on Vista 64. I went into it a while back, and it just couldn’t hook up to the cygwin install I had (default everything…). Never did get much more in depth than that.

Ponderosa - Hey, something that works! Nice tabbed interface, and runs the cygwin shell just fine. Downsides: doesn’t run the cmd.exe shell by default (you can run cygwin’s bash shell, then type “cmd.exe” and it’ll run it).

So now I have a working shell window in Windows that doesn’t suck. Woot.