On a traditional Unix system, a root user is one with uid=0 (uid is an abbreviation of user id).
On an MS-Windows NT family system (NT, 2000, XP), an administrative account is one in the group Administrators.
I'm no expert (rather a novice in many ways with cygwin), but I suspect that the upper concept maps probably to the lower concept on cygwin.
The files /etc/passwd and /etc/group should reveal how the cygwin (Unix-style) user names and group names map back to the MS-Windows NT family SIDs. As MS-Windows implements many of the underlying operations, it is the SIDs in question that will govern much of what happens. (SID = security descriptor number -- actually I forget exactly what it abbreviates -- but it is a unique number on your machine identifying a user, or a group.)
There are some documents about ntsec and these matters (although I myself have trouble following them).
Hope that this tidbit above might possibly help a little. If opaque, it at least should provide keyword fodder for web searches :)
Cordially,
Perry
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