[ale] OT: Cygwin profile trashed under X11

[johnmills at speakeasy.net (John Mills)]

ALErs -

I just set up a WinXPPro laptop with the current Cygwin, the usual 
defaults, and a few extras including X11. All starts well (including 
'fvwm2'), but I am not happy with the environment I receive in X11, 
p;articularly regarding the console:
 - no 'history' nor searches back to previous commands
 - very trashy 'xterm' setup with messed up prompting and an apparently 
   gratuitous and unsuccessful termcap entry for same
 - no command completion nor even usable 'destructive backspace' for 
   command editing

All these things are fine in the DOS-ish console for Cygwin, but get
trashed for my X11 sessions.

Questions:
 1. how can I check if the X11 user profile has been corrupted, and
 2. where should I work on these environment and setup problems, ideally
    getting something close to the Cygwin behavior?

TIA.
 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu