I just discovered something about Windows and gdb under MinGW.

I was playing in svn 2777 and it started to loop on me.

Not having run it "under" gdb I thought I'd try something just to see if it worked. So I opened up my MinGW MSYS command prompt window, and looked at the ps command help. "ps -W" lists Windows processes with their pid's. In this case, t-engine was on Windows pid 1088. So then I started gdb and did "attach 1088" and lo and behold, it neatly attached itself to the looping ToME process and stopped it, ready to debug.