Eclipse using MinGW make fails without msys

As background, I'm trying to build ChibiOS for STM32 on a Windows 8.1 host. This works perfectly well if I simply run make in the demo directory in the msys.bat command prompt. The toolchain and paths should thus be fine.

Now, if I simply set up an Eclipse project, it will try to run make.exe directly and fails. The output is similar to running make (either make.exe or mingw32-make.exe) from a plain cmd prompt.

make all 
       0 [main] sh 5524 sync_with_child: child 2444(0x188) died before initialization with status code 0xC0000142
     22 [main] sh 5524 sync_with_child: *** child state waiting for longjmp
/usr/bin/sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
      0 [main] sh 188 sync_with_child: child 1152(0x188) died before initialization with status code 0xC0000142
     26 [main] sh 188 sync_with_child: *** child state waiting for longjmp
/usr/bin/sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
      0 [main] sh 5096 sync_with_child: child 3200(0x18C) died before initialization with status code 0xC0000142
     25 [main] sh 5096 sync_with_child: *** child state waiting for longjmp
/usr/bin/sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
      0 [main] sh 5232 sync_with_child: child 3820(0x184) died before initialization with status code 0xC0000142
     25 [main] sh 5232 sync_with_child: *** child state waiting for longjmp
/usr/bin/sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
make: Nothing to be done for 'all'.

20:39:33 Build Finished (took 4s.171ms)

I've seen some info saying this is some aspect of Windows 8.1. Can I convince Eclipse to use msys somehow or is there another known clean way to make a make (any make) work without it?

Possibly related:

• http://forum.chibios.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=16023
• http://sourceforge.net/p/mingw/bugs/1013/?page=0

Bizarrely, the issue was solved for me by replacing msys-1.0.dll in WinAVR directory with the msys one. I'm guessing there is an ancient version there that somehow gets loaded while it's not in the system path as far as I can tell.

The links in the question refer to updating the dll or replacing it with a patched one.