VCS trouble: Nothing to Commit: No changes detected

Setup: Pycharm Community Edition 5.04 on Windows 7, accessing a a project on a remote server mounted with winSSH.  I've been using this setup for over a year.

Recently, with one project, I'm getting an error on commit saying "Nothing to Commit: No changes detected".  I've also seen a pop up error with the following:

The Git process exited with the code -1,073,741,818

This is also in the logs as:

2016-02-16 10:29:20,260 [ 175973]   INFO -                     #GitStatus - The Git process exited with the code -1,073,741,818 during executing git -c core.quotepath=false status --porcelain -z --untracked-files=no -- .
com.intellij.openapi.vcs.VcsException: The Git process exited with the code -1,073,741,818 during executing git -c core.quotepath=false status --porcelain -z --untracked-files=no -- .

Troubleshooting:

uninstalled & reinstalled Pycharm & Git (even cleaned the registry of all references to Pycharm & Jetbrains).

deleted the repository on the remote server and recreated it.

Still, same error

Thank you