Okay, makes sense.  It sure would be nice on Windows to have an equivalent of list2cmdline() that works for the shell.  I actually don't have immediate access to the code anymore, but I remember having to fool around with list2cmdline in the first place because it was difficult to do what I wanted without passing things through the shell (maybe I was spawning a process on Windows and capturing input/output/stderr; I don't remember in detail).

Maybe the solution is to make what I was trying to do easier without fooling with the shell instead of playing the fool's game of trying to improve the ability to deal with the shell so we can pass things through it unnecessarily.

Anyway, thanks.