One of the things I often run into when running the windows version of postgres is that after an ungraceful shutdown of my machine (lets face it, its windows and it crashes sometimes, especially my laptop), the database service will not start because of the old postmaster.pid file left around. I understand why this happens and is necessary, but when dealing with the windows port I think this is going to be a significant issue (I have already seen a number of emails to the list reporting this "problem"). I have a suggestion to mitigate this issue. Could the postgres service register the postmaster.pid file as a file that needs to be deleted on windows reboot. That way everytime you rebooted windows after either a crash or improper shutdown any left over pid file would be automatically removed (and we can be certain that no other postmaster is actually running since the machine is just being booted, so it is safe to delete the file). I think this would solve most of the problem and still leave the pid file in place doing what it was intended to do.
thanks,
--Barry