There are many better ways of doing what you are doing, but the specific problem with your code is that '&' has a special meaning on Windows command line. The simplest way to get your snippet to work would be to substitute the alternate url parameter separator ';' for the '&', I just tried this and it worked fine with NT4/IE 5.5.

Update: A third alternative (to the one above and quoting the whole thing as zigdon said) is to escape the '&' with the CMD meta quote character '^'. Eg.

"...?date=$date^&skip=5";