Problem with space in path

[cwright]

I use the Shell command in Visual Basic 5 to run .exe programs. Today it failed to work. After a little investigation I found that it only worked if there were no spaces in the path, so it could not run programs in Program Files. This was never a problem before. Also, running programs from Start - Run... works even if there are spaces in the path.

On Friday I did a small Windows update (required to install Windows Defender). I suspect this caused the problem. Does anyone have any ideas? Is there a Windows setting to disable paths with spaces? Or could it have created an incompatibility with VB5? Is there an alternative way to runs programs from VB5?

Many thanks.

Best regards,
Chris

 

[Spork 2.0]

Assuming you're running XP, there's probably an inherent conflict between VB5 and XP due to the fact that the OS that was around when VB5 was around was I think still Windows 95, which still used a bunch of the old rules leftover from the MS-DOS days and 95 still used FAT (possibly FAT32, but I think that didn't become popular till Win 98). For example if you go to run command (not cmd, which is the Command Line interface for XP that is similar to DOS) you get a DOS emulator that still doesn't use spaces or long file names (it gets around this by using a ~).

All I can think of off the top of my head is maybe while updating XP you might have updated from FAT32 to NTFS, which would be fairly easy to do considering you can accomplish it through Windows without formatting your hard drive. I'd hate to say that you won't be able to use VB5 anymore, especially considering that .NET is pretty expensive.

 

[Syrillian]

Spork 2.0 may be on to something. I use VB6 on XP with no known issues (I am not a Guru), and attempted to replicate your issue to no avail.

Maybe an update to VB6?
You could try a system restore to a point that pre-dates your issue.

Good luck.