With Windows 7 in a vitrual box VM on OS X, some very odd things happen
with dates and time stamps when SSHing into cygwin. e.g. here the
"Change" time is in the past:

$ date; touch foo; stat foo
Fri Dec  2 16:58:07 GMTST 2011
  File: `foo'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular
empty file
Device: 540aba0bh/1409989131d   Inode: 562949953592977  Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/     ian)   Gid: (  513/    None)
Access: 2011-12-02 16:58:07.414457900 +0000
Modify: 2011-12-02 16:58:07.414457900 +0000
Change: 2011-12-02 16:58:03.495141800 +0000
 Birth: 2011-12-02 16:57:57.731469900 +0000

And if we copy such a file, then the copy is older (as determined by the
"Modify" time) than the original:

$ date; touch foo; stat foo; cp foo bar; stat bar
Fri Dec  2 16:59:10 GMTST 2011
  File: `foo'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular
empty file
Device: 540aba0bh/1409989131d   Inode: 1407374883725128  Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/     ian)   Gid: (  513/    None)
Access: 2011-12-02 16:59:10.118457900 +0000
Modify: 2011-12-02 16:59:10.118457900 +0000
Change: 2011-12-02 16:59:06.189477700 +0000
 Birth: 2011-12-02 16:57:57.731469900 +0000
  File: `bar'
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular
empty file
Device: 540aba0bh/1409989131d   Inode: 281474976882512  Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/     ian)   Gid: (  513/    None)
Access: 2011-12-02 16:59:06.394555800 +0000
Modify: 2011-12-02 16:59:06.394555800 +0000
Change: 2011-12-02 16:59:06.395532400 +0000
 Birth: 2011-12-02 16:58:40.921899600 +0000

This means that make thinks that things are out of date when it
shouldn't, so reinvokes itself repeatedly until the MAKE_RESTARTS
infinite-recursion test triggers.

The touchy program, like most other programs, creates files with both
Modify and Change in the past, which is still a little odd, but is
consistent, so doesn't break make.