How does cmdproxy do what it does?

[djc]

I find myself using cmdproxy.exe from the GNU emacs distribution for a
purpose outside emacs: when I use DIR in a normal cmd.exe command
window on WinXP, it produces wrong results for filenames that contain
accented characters, but when I use DIR under cmdproxy.exe, it
produces correct results.  And I need those results outside emacs.

How does cmdproxy do this?  And how can I run cmd.exe without cmdproxy
so that DIR produces correct results?

I've looked at cmdproxy's source code, but I'm not able to dig the
answer out there.

djc