I've been driven crazy by this type of thing in the past. In my case it was with the same application (not two like you), but on different machines, with all supposedly having the same OS load. In some cases I would get short path names and in others I would get long path names. I could never figure it out any logical explanation for the behaviour so I just worked around it (*cough* hack *cough*).
To help you generally get around it, you may not know about these two functions (both in kernel32)... GetShortPathName - http://tinyurl.com/nxzkl GetLongPathName - http://tinyurl.com/r4ey4 You can work out a scheme with these where it doesn't matter what mood Windows is in when you ask it for a path. In my case I had another big problem, and that was that it would also arbitrarily decide to change the case of critical paths.. eg: "C:\Windows" on one machine, and "C:\windows" on another. That also drove me bonkers and resulted in some lost years/hair. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
