certain console programs lock up in WinXP

This used to never happen, but it seems that now a lot of text-console programs lock up when I run them and I have to kill their process.

This happens with edit and the console version of nethack, and probably other programs.  They seem to lock up as soon as they expect input.  Telnet seems to work fine, but I can't go by just using telnet.

Does anyone know what might be going on?

on second look it's just DOS console programs

The Win32 text-console port of Nethack works.  just not the DOS text-console port of Nethack.  But it has worked for as long as I can remember until recently.