Hello Athanasius,

apart from my allergy to any non ascii chars in everything in any os, if i remember correctly Strawberry told me something like:"Strawberry Perl cannot be installed in a directory with spaces or non-ASCII characters" and probably the space is worst than ampersand. I personally would prefer to reinstall the program in a normalized path..
Anyway i think you can modify the portableshell.bat to include your malefical path as follow

  set _TEST="c:\path\dir & test"

  set PATH=%_TEST%;%drivep%\perl\site\bin;%drivep%\perl\bin;%drivep%\c
+\bin;%PATH%
[download]

then you can use it as you wish, after launching the batch:

c:\strawberry>set
...
Path="c:\ulisse\dir & test";C:\ulisse\strawberry\perl\site\bin;C:\ulis
+se\strawberry\perl\bin;

...

_TEST="c:\path\dir & test"



c:\strawberry>cd %_TEST%

c:\path\dir & test>perl -e "print $ENV{PATH}"
c:\path\dir & test;C:\strawberry\perl\site\bin;C:\strawberry\perl\bin;
+C:\strawberry\c\bin; .....
[download]

UPDATE: ahh.. you can also use junction (from sysinternals) as mentioned in the thread Installing CPAN on a Windows system or native command to achieve the same result: see here

HtH

L*