[h-e-w] M-x shell: Spawning child process: invalid argument

[Christopher G D Tipper]

I have searched the list and found no answer to this query.

I have just installed emacs on my Windows partition

GNU Emacs 20.7.1 (i386-*-windows98.1998)
 of Tue Jun 13 2000 on buffy

I do 'M-x shell' and I get 
Spawning child process: invalid argument

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

I have removed my _emacs file, and this gives the same behaviour i.e. as it 
is out-of-the-box. Of course this is stopping all other shell apps from working 
(no auctex).

Thanks in advance,
Christopher
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