I have a very minor comment. I don't see any difference between cmd and cmd /d on my machine. They both start the console at the same directory.
Basic Hints for windows command line programming: Install Cygwin and get some proper tools that you can use to actually do stuff with 
On the rare occasions I have to use Windows machines I find the thing that annoys me the most is the lack of a decent command line environment. Having to do everything through dialogs and windows and mouse clicks seems painfully slow in comparison.
Actually there is quite a serious flaw in cygwin - and that is you can't launch windows binaries from it - if it was slightly better integrated it would be absolutely killer. I guess most cygwin users are not looking for good integration though 
I'm pretty sure that MinGW can launch binaries, but then expecting any new programmer to use a Unix type environment is just harsh.
Oh, and the /d has nothing to do with the directory that the console starts in.
If you check the docs for cmd :
http://www.microsoft.com/resourc...d.mspx?
mfr=true
You can see that starting it with /d disables autorun - something I didn't explicitly mention.
Commenting by HaloScan
