System is Win32, with a 3 week old cygwin and Activestate python install. I use rxvt as a terminal and tcsh as a shell.When I enter "python -m pdb snake.py" it just sits there. To run the debugger ...

I finally traced that down to a potential effect of having the cygwin installation on a Fat32 system rather than on NTFS and after converting the partition, things improved indeed.