Something strange in cor.test in R-1.8.0 (PR#4718)

maechler  writes:

"Duncan" == Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch@pair.com>
    on Wed, 22 Oct 2003 08:17:32 -0400 writes:

Duncan> I've now tried the code 

 set.seed(1)
 x <- rnorm(50)
 y <- rnorm(50)
 cor.test(x,y,method="spearman")
 x <- rnorm(50)
 y <- rnorm(50)
 cor.test(x,y,method="spearman")

Duncan> in r-patched (which gives apparently correct results), and r-devel,
Duncan> which gives the first result correct, the second incorrect; when
Duncan> repeated, both are bad.

Hmm,
funny.

I get repeatable results in in R 1.7.1 , 1.8.0, R-patched and
R-devel (all on Linux),

with an (ugly but convenient) 1-liner :

set.seed(1); for(k in 1:2){x <- rnorm(50);y <- rnorm(50);print(unlist(cor.test(x,y,method="spearman")[1:4]))}

  statistic.S       p.value  estimate.rho 
23640.0000000     0.3482088    -0.1351741 
 statistic.S      p.value estimate.rho 
1.724800e+04 2.322263e-01 1.717647e-01

I get the same on Debian GNU/Linux.

Where do we stand on this?  Windows-specific?