at work I've found similar problems. The big boss wanted a (somewhat) simple utility to work with text files, so I made up a perl script to do it. I wanted to avoid the whole issue about explaining how to run a script through the interpreter, so I just used perl2exe - which as far as I can tell, just drags the perl interpreter around with it (more or less). The problem is that I THOUROUGLY test my programs on my computer (and a couple others nearby) with no problems, but when someone else uses the programs on different machines, the computer freezes. Other than the fact that it makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing (programming wise) I find it very fustrating. And from what I can tell, it's all pointing to use of backticks. Guess the moral of the story is, never trust backticks on windows.

Anyone know if Shell works any better?