Hi Steven,
Sorry, its not your problem. I rm -fr'd my reactos tree and did a clean CVS checkout and things are cool now. I guess the current build system left some crap around that caused problems. Nice work btw on the smss stuff. How much trouble do you think it would be possible to make a native mode console application in smss like the Windows recovery console? I have been thinking about doing this for the boot CD for a while but would like to make it more powerful than the Windows recovery console.
SM needs some work mostly in the security and DBGSS area. I am exploring how to move Kmode in CSR, just like winlogon, because it does not belong there: this differs slightly from NT, but it's because multiuser support won't be like in NT/2k/XP/2k3. Major work and cleanup is needed in CSR: I'd like it to be a general purpose server DLL loader, so implementing a subsystem would be just the matter of wrinting a "special" library.
The major problem for a native shell (ntosh.exe?) is I/O. As no subsystem is present it has to open the keyboard and video devices. It would be better implementing first a static library with basic stdio functions that relies only on NTDLL. I've seen some code floating in the comp newsgroups. That could be a base. I think the ERD Commander by Russinovich is a native application (he also has some sample code on his site).
Emanuele