are extra quotes in the specials in the dvi, one could think that the For sure, the extra quotes are a problem in TeX.
Of course, it may be that there is no way at TeX level to remove the extra quotes. As Heiko said, with the current mechanism there is no way AFAIK to use \input filenames with actual " characters. I guess my question was to know when this situation changed, and thus how we can test for it I don't think you can check for 8-bit chars vs. ^^e9 based on a version or a date -- you have to just run a little test and see. At least, I can't give you any exact cutoff; the behavior may even have gone back and forth. Furthermore, MiKTeX and Web2c/teTeX/TeX Live may well do it differently (not to mention VTeX, TrueTeX, PCTeX, ...), and since you're targeting Windows ... Cheers, k