Why won't gdb debug Smaug? And what is ntdll.dll?

I just compiled the Smaug with the latest beta of Dev-C++ (what a nightmare!) and it runs fine. But when I try to debug it with gdb (to find out where first_auth is initialized before being used--it's driving me crazy!) gdb crashes saying that it can't find ntdll.dll.

GDB will debug other programs fine, and Smaug will run fine without the debugger running....

What the heck is ntdll.dll???? I'm running windows XP, not NT.

I'm not sure why gdb is crashing, but I can answer the other problem. I think ntdll.dll is one of the core NT dlls, maybe the kernel, maybe not. XP is simply a variant of NT (as is also Windows 2000), like Windows 98 and ME are variants of Windows 95.

To debug, why not just compile with Cygwin, that should work better. :)