The bat has >>%vbs% echo oShellLink.IconLocation = "%1, 0"to produce oShellLink.IconLocation = ""C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.exe", 0"` where %1 is a quoted path However, unless I remove the quotes from path like here: oShellLink.IconLocation = "C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.exe, 0" I get the titular error. What do you suggest? (Note that %1 is always supplied with quotes) Also, I'm not very familiar with vbscript, why does it require no quotes next to each other? ... Still not clear why vbscript can't interpret this assignment, but found a fix: %~1 - Expands %1 and removes any surrounding quotation marks ("").