I'm not to sure that's the real problem, If it were they would get an error along the lines of 'c:\program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

For that matter, no matter how I've tried to mangle the path to the bat, I can't get any errors about cmd.exe, I've even emptied everything out of the Path, and all that happened then is, ... well nothing, the script runs but the bat either doesn't run or has no output, but no error. I tried to see if I could generate the error by renaming cmd.exe, but I just got a new one right away.

update: ah here we go, forgot to turn warnings on when testing:
With Path emptied of everything but perl, I get the same error, and just to see if I could match, I ran the script from the same directory and gave it just the name of the .bat, and it ran just fine. So i would have to agree with some of the previous posters in that it's a problem with the the Path environment variable, it apparently doesn't contain the path to cmd.exe. Though I'm not entirely certain why everything runs fine when it's passed just the batch file's name

update: minor reformatting