Maybe it's just too late in my caffeine cycle, but I didn't think you could simply escape double-quotes in DOS, can you? That would make it too easy, and I'm pretty sure I remember otherwise.
-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
I too was shocked to see it work, and yesterday was a caffeine-less day for me, so it must be true! Yesterday was on win2k -- i just tried it with success on win98 as well!
C:\temp>echo "blah \" ad"
"blah \" ad"
C:\temp>echo blah \" ad
blah \" ad