gen-keys hanging in WinXP SP2

[Michael McAllister]

Hi

(I sent a previous version of this which doesn't seem to have come through
to the list. It was originally in Outlook HTML form email which I've noticed
mailman sometimes filters out - so, I'm resending with more info and
(hopefull!) as a plain text email.)

I'm a newbie user of gpg, and am trying to generate my first key. I have
version 1.2.5 installed on WinXP SP2. The software is installed in the
default directory (c:\gnupg) with the main executables copied into
c:\windows\system32.

I started generating my first key (for this address) last night (around
11:30pm?), and as of this morning it still hasn't finished. I did spend some
time registering some keyboard activity as suggested, but that doesn't seem
to have helped. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be going
wrong, and how to fix it? Specifically what happens is it asks me for my
passphrase twice, and then once I've entered that, the generation of keys
hangs. I have done some research and can say:-

- The output of random characters (mainly plus signs?) does not occur after
entering the passphrase, and while doing calculations for the key.

- I do NOT receive any error about not enough entropy being available.
That's because I don't receive ANYTHING ;-)

Oh, forgot to mention - my machine is a 3GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, so I don't
see the machine being a limiting factor.

Regards

Mike