I wondered if you could help me with a little problem:
I upgaded to Windows 2000 Professional ages ago but I need to use DOS to program in PASCAL for my A Level Computing course. When I try to run any DOS program I get "Invalid Command.com - System Halted" Could this be because I upgraded from Windows: ME (3.90 Build 3000)? Is there anyway I could get a "working" version of MS DOS To program in? - Thanks for any light you can shed on this subject...

Hmm, is there a command.com in the program directory? If so delete it. DO NOT delete the command.com in the WINNT/system32 directory.

Also if that does not work then download the trial of Connectix Virtual PC from www.connectix.com and try it.

You might also check your COMSPEC environment variable... type "set comspec" and a command prompt to see it. It should be "C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe" (assuming windows is in c:\windows).

Maybe also do a search on the drive for command.com, and delete every instance of it, except the one in system32.

Its easy to blame the problem on upgrading from Windows ME, while it does work, it isn't really supported by Microsoft. If you ever get the chance, clean install later on.

I had another Command.com file, it was in with Take Two (Adaptec Easy CD Creator 5) I Recycle Binned it for now and I'll try my DOS Programs... Thanks for your help!

We had a customer order two systems with ati 9000, a gig of RAM, and two 120 gig harddrives per machine. They do graphic art and design, and even went so far as to get 17' flat panel monitors. An interesting twist was that they wanted to run some very nasty DOS programs that they refused to upgrade. After a lot of struggle, we opted to dual boot. Was sad, Dos 6.1 on one 500 meg partition, and 2k on the rest. Works fine, but I wonder how if this other solution might have worked?

After getting rid of the command.com it didn't solve my problems but I found this:
1.Click Start, click Run, type NOTEPAD %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\AUTOEXEC.NT, and then click OK.
2.Remove the entire ComSpec line in the Autoexec.nt file. The line will look similar to the following sample: ComSpec=C:\WINDOWS\system32\COMMAND.COM
3.Correct the ComSpec environment variables in the System properties. To do so, follow these steps:
a.Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
b.Double-click the System icon, click the Advanced tab, and then click Environment Variables.
c.Highlight the ComSpec line, and then click Edit at the bottom of the window.
4.Make sure the Variable Value id set to: %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe
DOS now works perfectly... Anyway, Thanks very much for your help... I now love Windows 2000 even more...