These days, it seems like POSIX has become just another VM environment, like Smalltalk, Erlang, the JVM or the CLR. Mingw/Cygwin doesn't run *nix programs "on" Windows, really; it just provides them with a really half-assed VM implementation. Why not instead just go all the way and run, say, Ubuntu Server in a headless VMware appliance? If nothing else, it gives your spare cores something to do :)