cmd.exe and command.com in Windows

[Chris Sheffield]

I have a customer who's using my company's application that called our tech
support with a problem where it would just suddenly quit under Windows
without an error or anything.  It turns out they are running a security
program (Visual CASEL) on their Windows workstations.  When logged on as an
administrator, everything was working fine, but when logged on with a
student account, the program would suddenly die.  They discovered that it
was because, by default, their security was blocking access to "cmd.exe" and
"command.com", which I'm assuming the shell function uses to accomplish it's
tasks.  But the weird thing is, I'm not using shell anywhere.  So I did a
search for "shell" in the docs, and one function that came up was
specialFolderPath, but nowhere in the documentation for that function does
it actually mention the shell function or cmd.exe or command.com.  But the
user has verified by watching the list of processes that "cmd.exe" does
indeed run at a couple different points when first starting up our program.

So does specialFolderPath use "cmd.exe" and/or "command.com"?  If so, why
isn't this documented?  Our user was not happy at all that they had to allow
access to these executables because they could potentially be used to format
one's hard drive or perform other damaging tasks.  And I suspect we'll have
others with the same problem.  I was also told that Foolproof, another
popular security system in schools, also blocks access to these modules by
default.  If anyone has any kind of workaround, I would be most grateful to
hear it.

Thank you,

Chris Sheffield
Software Development
Read Naturally



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