Thanks, I've read all of those:

'can't spawn nowait'

This involved the spawned process returning a negative value. This is not the case, as the script we are spawning can not return negative.

Can't spawn "cmd.exe": No error at

This talks about perl depending on your path to find cmd.exe, or spaces in the filenames, neither of which seem to apply to this problem. IAC, it discusses the "No such File or Directory" error, not "Bad File Descriptor"

system command can't spawn cmd.exe

This one doesn't contain anything relevant, nor does the OP know how his problem cleared up. And again, the error is different.

system command erroneously states 'can't spawn <executable>'

Completely unrelated.

None of those threads seem to be related to what I am seeing. I'm still pursuing the Windows Patch angle. Apparently some of our machines have patches installed that I.T. can't explain how they got on there. Out of a pool of 30 machines, I have 4 that exhibit this problem sporadically, so I'm focusing on those 4 now.

Thanks