Program file stopping services starting

I recently ran into an issue where servers were no longer starting any more. The problem coincidentally happened after i'd run a simple batch script on the machine in question. After lots of investigation it turned out the reason for the service no longer starting was a file called:

c:\program

After lots of investigation I found this to be caused by using the full path of c:\Program File in my script (even though it had quotes round it). To stop it doing this I used the c:\progra~1 notation. I also wonder if this was to do with my computer being Windows 2000 rather than XP, as this didn't happen with XP, and not specifically selecting cmd.exe to run the script.