Recently I've been doing some tests with "Restart in MS-DOS mode", and though it works, when I try to exit it back to Windows the system hangs.

Most of the times I get this message:

1While initializing device SHELL:
2Cannot find or load required file KRNL386.EXE. The file was not found.
3
4Press any key to continue...

Which is quite strange to say the least... I managed to workaround this by manually changing the directory to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and then running 'exit' there.

Another solution I came up with is manually editing the PATH so that C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM is always included.

Now my question is, why this behavior? I don't have this problem in other installations. I completely emptied the config.sys and autoexec.bat files just in case there was a conflict to no avail.

Any ideas?

I was used to simply boot into MS-DOS 7.11 (before Windows) and doing my DOS activity there, but since I started to enjoy the "Restart in MS-DOS" route, I'd like to get this sorted out.