I'm unable to execute dos commands without specifying the full absolute paths on
the slave machines. The reason is that the system PATH gets set to the PATH
from the master. It sounds crazy but one other person on the mailing list
confirmed seeing this as well.

Here are the details:

In the environment settings of the slave, it shows this:

PATH=c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_06\bin;…(stuff omitted)…
C:\cygwin\home\Administrator\config\ant1.6\bin;C:\cygwin\bin

This looks okay to me. So the slave process seems fine.

But if I execute a windows batch command “set” it prints out all the variables.
The PATH now has the actual path from the master unix server.

PATH=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:...:/home/hudson/bin