You have an additional quote in the second command line at column 38, if you add this quote to your first given command line the behavior is the same. Well this is the world we live in And these are the hands we're given. Or cmd.exe without having to provide the full path. Moreover, once you specify the full path, all subsequent commands in the same cmd session can be run directly by using %comspec% Temporary solution, it seems, would be to specify the direct path to the cmd interpreter and to use quotes for cmd. The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). More interestingly, C:\Users\Admin>start '' '%comspec% /c start /b start '' '%comspec% /c start /b start '' '%comspec% ' /c start /b start '' 'C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe' /c start /b
The 0xC0000142 maps to STATUS_DLL_INIT_FAILED, and the cmd error code 9059.