-----Original Message-----
Microsoft's command line cannot cope with two pathnames that must be quoted, so if the command path itself must be quoted, then no argument to the command can be quoted. There are tricky hacks that can work around this mind-boggling stupidity, but life is simpler if Python itself doesn't use up the one quoted pathname. I don't know if Microsoft has had the good sense to fix this in Vista (which I probably will never use, since an alternative exists), but they didn't in XP.
Do you have any references for this claim? In my command line on XP sp2, this works just fine: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC>"c:\Program Files\TextPad 4\TextPad.exe" "c:\tmp\f a.txt" "c:\tmp\f b.txt" Both the program, and the two file names are quoted and textpad.exe opens them both. Cheers, Kristján