Windows Explorer Configuration Failures

I modify Windows Explorer on a regular basis. It is the purpose of this site to instruct you in what is possible and to supply a number of hints. However, there are many things which I have never been able to accomplish. Some of these are presented here. If you happen to find a solution to one of these, Please let me know.

In case there is any doubt, I believe that most of these problems are actually an intentional effort to destroy DOS.

Calling bat files via the SendTo Menu fails
Trying to use test.bat.pif (the .pif is not displayed), where the only bat command is
       @echo hi there
fails if command.com is executed first. When the pif command is
       c:\windows\command.com /k "C:\temp\TEST.BAT %1"
the error is
       Specified COMMAND search directory bad
However, when the pif command is
       C:\temp\TEST.BAT %1 the bat file executes as expected.
Select a group of files and use SendTo to zip them
I tried to figure out a way to automaically zip a group of files. No way. I tried PIF's to pkzip.exe and PIF's to zip.bat. When they were run directly, they worked, but when run using SendTo, they had all kinds of failures. This is obviously a part of the plan to destroy DOS. Edit and Debug work fine in SendTo, but PKZip does not. (Humm, maybe DOS wasn't the target? )
OKC:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\EDIT.COM
OKC:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\DEBUG.EXE
FailedC:\UTILS\PKWARE\PKZIP.EXE new.zip
This fails because Windows Explorer deletes all the command line parameters (including new.zip) and concatenates the selected files to the end of the command. However, double clicking the shortcut (pif file) works as expected.
Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org
URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / WinExplorer / Failures.htm