hi Mike,

 MB> I checked further, and it does seem that, officially, COMSPEC is
 MB> supposed to point to the DOS command processor, not the OS/2 command
 MB> processor.

I've never seen it point that way (except inside a DOS box).  The second
example of HELP SET points it to CMD too.

 MB>  My (OS/2 Warp Connect) system does see the COMSPEC
 MB> environment variable defined in an OS/2 session, and it is defined to
 MB> point to CMD.EXE.  I am fairly sure that, at some point in the past,
 MB> I chose OS2_SHELL for a reason, but I am not entirely sure I now know
 MB> what it was.

One reason might be is that the minimal CONFIG.SYS used on bootdiskettes
defines only OS2_SHELL, not COMSPEC or SHELL.

regards,
         hugo