The original poster uses windir/system32. I think it's not a good idea, to use such an special OS folder for a user installed executable. Especially Vista/Win7 haves special mechanismns to protect this folder. In addition to this: windows uses differrent ways to expand paths while searching executables(see above).

I don't think, that we should try to handle these MS-Windows specific problems.

Many of us do not have any problems with a win7 fossil install. For me the following works pretty good (on different windows versions (XP Home, XP Prof., Win7 HP):

  1  install fossil into a fodler in the data area, including executable and repositories (this makes it easy to copy the installation between different computers)
  2  add the install directory to the PATH environment variable
  3  install a using the complete path, so the OS path search is deactivated

The problem of the original poster should be solved, if the service uses a fully qualified path instead of giving only fossil (and letting the OS search for the path).

In my opinion, this isn't a problem, which should/can be solved in fossil => Close ticket?