...have been running Widows 7 Pro with STARTUP folder modified to run two BATs to create two CMD boxes, one left and one right. A few days ago at logoff time 13 updates to Windows7 were installed and at logon the next day the two CMD boxes had a new error message preceding the command prompt: "Not enough storage is available to process this command." Typing in "DIR /X" at the command prompt does return the directory list but with three error messages: 1. The system cannot find message text for message number 0x235f in the message file for Application. 2. The system cannot find message text for message number 0x235b in the message file for Application. 3. DNS bad key ...i.e. none of the usual DIR text annotations.
Now, from the command line, any BAT file with "cmd /k" in it produces the same box with the same errors.
Modifying a BAT file to call "C:Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k" instead of simply "cmd /k" solves the BAT problem on the command line...AND making this change in the two STARTUP BATs solves the problem at startup. However, this is just a temporary work-around. The bare "cmd" without the full path will fail.
CORRECTION: as suggested by Harry Johnston below, there was another cmd.exe present, this one in C: identical to the one in C:\Windows\System32 and after giving it an alias the STARTUP BATs work OK. So this post becomes a trivial anomaly which may or may not have resulted from a Windows update, and may be deleted.
Does anyone know what updates to Win7 caused this problem, and how they might be uninstalled. Good ol' WinXP would have a long list of them. There's a lot of interesting and relevant info here: https://superuser.com/questions/159034/spurious-out-of-memory and here: http://blog.airesoft.co.uk/2009/10/desktop-heap-monitor-vista-7/ but maybe someone has a quick answer. ..Thanks for any reply.