Help yall (cornered bee, Mr. Pro)

I have written a small exe file that changes a couple or registry settings, then restarts explorer.exe. This program takes mandatory command line parameters. If not given, syntax info is given on stdout.

The testing:
When compiled and run on command line on my dev machine, all works as expected. If params are not given, the syntax info is printed. If all params are present, the reg settings are changed, explorer restarted..... it works fine.

The problem:
This was written to run on a XP embedded system. This system is somewhat stripped down from a standard XP install. When this app is run from command line, and no params given, it just goes straight back to the command prompt. No syntax info is printed. Furthermore, if the params are entered, the program does nothing. Registry is not touched.

I would imagine if some support libraries or dlls needed to be present that the program would crash, or windows would complain.

Does anyone have any idea why it is acting this way? I am about to monitor it with filemon and regmon to see if I can identify anything weird going on.

Will post if I find anything.

thx