Postgres dies on standby server after triggering failover

Hi.

I posted this question at the end of October, and didn't get any responses,
so I'm gonna try one more time.

I have a problem with a standby server running on Windows 2003 R2,
Enterprise x64 edition. I use Postgres 8.3 (installed to C:\Program Files
(x86)\ )
Everything was working fine (base backup, archiving, recovery), until I
wanted to test failover.
I created the trigger file, the restore_command returned a nonzero exit
code, but postgres said "could not open file... No such file or directory",
and died.
I'm not sure if this has anything to do with running a 32 bit postgres on a
64 bit machine, or whether it's a bug. Maybe postgres didn't think that the
restore command failed?? As the restore_command, I tried using a compiled
perl script, pg_standby, and even the system copy command. They all give the
same result.
I should mention that whenever I start postgres (in recovery mode) from the
service console, I get a message saying that postgres started and then
stopped. I figured postgres was in some pending mode, waiting for the
recovery to end before it can really start (accepting connections). Should I
start it another way (like pg_ctl) when I'm doing recovery?

Since this is my first time implementing database replication I really can't
tell what went wrong.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Ori

----------

Some dumps.
Postgres restores files, but gives an error after I created the trigger
file, and the restore_command returned a nonzero error code:

2008-10-29 16:39:23 CET LOG: restored log file "0000000100000011000000CF"
from archive
2008-10-29 16:42:25 CET LOG: restored log file "0000000100000011000000D0"
from archive
2008-10-29 16:45:56 CET LOG: restored log file "0000000100000011000000D1"
from archive
2008-10-29 16:49:02 CET LOG: restored log file "0000000100000011000000D2"
from archive
2008-10-29 16:58:45 CET LOG: could not open file
"pg_xlog/0000000100000011000000D3" (log file 17, segment 211): No such file
or directory

Now postgres seemed to be stuck, or dead. Using Process Explorer I saw that
one of the postgres.exe processes was running drwtsn32.exe (Dr Watson
Postmortem debugger) indefinitely. When I kill drwtsn32, postgres dies too,
resulting in the following lines in the log (nothing had been logged between
16:58:45 and 17:20:27)

2008-10-29 17:20:27 CET LOG: startup process (PID 2952) was terminated by
exception 0xC000000D
2008-10-29 17:20:27 CET HINT: See C include file "ntstatus.h" for a
description of the hexadecimal value.
2008-10-29 17:20:27 CET LOG: aborting startup due to startup process
failure

When I looked at the Event Log, I saw an Application Error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: (100)
Event ID: 1000
Date: 29-10-2008
Time: 16:58:47
User: N/A
Computer: S1217
Description:
Faulting application postgres.exe, version 8.3.1.876, faulting module
msvcr80.dll, version 8.0.50727.762, fault address 0x0001e879.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 70 6f 73 ure pos
0018: 74 67 72 65 73 2e 65 78 tgres.ex
0020: 65 20 38 2e 33 2e 31 2e e 8.3.1.
0028: 38 37 36 20 69 6e 20 6d 876 in m
0030: 73 76 63 72 38 30 2e 64 svcr80.d
0038: 6c 6c 20 38 2e 30 2e 35 ll 8.0.5
0040: 30 37 32 37 2e 37 36 32 0727.762
0048: 20 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 at offs
0050: 65 74 20 30 30 30 31 65 et 0001e
0058: 38 37 39 879