Just wanted to close off this thread.
Previously I reported that building 8.3.4 with MingW on Windows resulted
in an initdb executable that couldn't create new databases due to
security restrictions in creating global file mappings in Vista.
I'm happy to say that the problem seems fixed in 8.3.5, which I have
successfully built, installed, and created new databases with.
And just to note this for anyone else who runs into the issue - if you
build postgresql with MingW then make sure you are using the latest
version of the MingW runtime:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435&package_id=11598
Specifically, use version 3.15.1 released on 2008-10-04 (or hopefully
later). In the previous version, getopt_long is broken, meaning you
cannot use any long style switches to initdb (for example, initdb
--locale=C doesn't work and causes initdb to exit with an error message).
Thanks,
Charlie