Shell doesn't work with 4nt as COMSPEC

[Mickey Ferguson]

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In GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i386-msvc-nt4.0.1381)
 of 2001-11-01 on MFERGUSON_NT
configured using `configure --with-msvc (12.00)'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: ENU
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

Running 21.1 on NT 4.0 SP6a, with COMSPEC set to 4nt.exe (version
3.02b), I can't use M-x shell.  It crashes with the following
information:

......................................................................

4NT  3.02B   Windows NT 4.00
Copyright 1988-1999  Rex Conn & JP Software Inc.  All Rights Reserved
4NT S/N ES650241, registered to Mickey Ferguson
for use on a single computer.  May not be distributed to others.

The instruction at 0042b85b referenced memory at 00901000
The memory could not be written
Process shell exited abnormally with code 5

......................................................................

If I change the COMSPEC environment variable (using M-x setenv) to
c:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe, shell works fine.  I could provide my .emacs
contents if needed, although this problem happens even if I start up
emacs using the --no-init-file --no-site-file switches, so that
shouldn't be a factor.

Can anyone provide any further information about exactly how emacs actually
runs the program associated with COMSPEC?  Maybe I can pass this info along
to the 4dos/4nt authors (JP Software) and they might be able to figure it
out.


Recent input:
M-x s h e l l <return> M-x r e p SPC o SPC r SPC <
return>

Recent messages:
Loading d:/emacs/.recentf...done
Loading bytecomp...done
Loading byte-opt...done
Loading generic...done
Loading mule-util...done
Loading MF-Init...done
Loading two-column...done
For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type C-h C-p.
Loading shell...done
Loading emacsbug...done