---

drh added on 2009-09-13 16:21:13:
The patch shown above turns out to work. Fixed by check-in 42bf80978d9740dbac8c762033348fbb1da9b0de.

---

drh added on 2009-09-13 11:47:15:
I think that the following patch may be sufficient to fix this:

--- src/file.c
+++ src/file.c
@@ -244,10 +244,11 @@
 ** Convert /A/../ to just /
 */
 void file_canonical_name(const char *zOrigName, Blob *pOut){
   if( zOrigName[0]=='/'
 #ifdef __MINGW32__
+      || zOrigName[0]=='\\'
       || (strlen(zOrigName)>3 && zOrigName[1]==':'
            && (zOrigName[2]=='\\' || zOrigName[2]=='/'))
 #endif
   ){
     blob_set(pOut, zOrigName);

I will strive to boot up a copy of windows this afternoon and try it out. In the meantime, a work-around might be to use forward slashes ("/") instead of backslashes ("\") in the pathname, at least for the first character of an absolute pathname.