title: Windows START command failing to run when executed from RPC
body: <p>Long story short I have written a program that allows me to install software and run commands on Windows machines remotely.  I have been using the START command (which i learned about from another post on stackoverflow found <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1449188/running-windows-batch-file-commands-asynchronously">here</a>) to execute the batch file through RPC so that my server doesn't have to wait for the install to finish.  It works fine on most of the 1000 computers at the school district I wrote this for, but I have a few computers that the START doesn't run the batch file.  I am not getting any error messages and all of the searching I have done only finds more examples of how to use the START command.  I have not been able to find any references to it simply not running.</p>
  
  <p>My server is linux and is using winexe for the RPC.  Here is the command that I am running.</p>
  
  <pre><code>winexe -W domain -U adminUser --password=adminPassword //compName.domain.internal --runas=domain\\adminUser%adminPassword "\\\\Server\\PathToBatch\\run.cmd \\\\Server\\PathToBatch\\install.cmd"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The run.cmd code is below.</p>
  
  <pre><code>START %1
  exit
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The install.cmd batch file is generated by my program depending on what they want to install.  The extra \s in the command are escape characters because the \ is the escape character in linux.</p>
  
  <p>The output I get is.</p>
  
  <pre><code>C:\WINDOWS\system32&gt;start \\Server\PathToBatch\install.cmd 
  C:\WINDOWS\system32&gt;exit
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>No error messages, and the output is the same on a computer that does start correctly.</p>
  
  <p>I have tried running the command from a command prompt on the machine exactly as it is run through RPC and it works fine.  I can run the install.cmd by its self using RPC and it works fine except I have to wait for the install to finish.  The exact same batch files can be run on other computers without problems.</p>
  
  <p>Watching Task Manager on a computer that works I can see a cmd process run by the adminUser start and then start a second cmd process and the first goes away.  On a non working computer it starts the first cmd process and goes away without the second cmd process ever starting.</p>
  
  <p>I have not been able to find any differences between the working computer and non working computer.  There is no firewall on the computers.</p>
  
  <p>We will be re-imaging these computers during summer break and I expect they will probably start working after that, so it isn't urgent that I figure this out.  I mainly want to know why it isn't working so that I can prevent it from failing in the future on other machines.  </p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.</p>