Thanks very much for the tip, Ray - it has led me to discover the
Windows Event Viewer, which I did not even know existed. It was a sort
of help, because it enabled me - eventually - to diagnose that the
problem was to do with directory permissions.
I had installed PostgreSQL with its data directory set to be under the
Administrator's "home" directory, since that is the account I log on as.
It seems that PostgreSQL, running as user postgres, couldn't see this
directory. I have since reinstalled PostgreSQL, setting the data
directory to be somewhere that Windows doesn't seem to restrict the
permissions of (that weirdness is another whole story), and it runs fine.
This is a real gotcha in the PostgreSQL Windows installation process -
it should give you at least a warning about trying to create a data
directory in a location that is not accessible to the postgres user.
It also seems to show a weakness in PostgreSQL's logging, in that (a) it
would help a lot if it just printed its error to stderr, and (b) the log
message it did send to the event log was of the form "directory not
found" rather than "permission denied".
Eddie
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