After installing java, grails and groovy on my Windows XP laptop, grails would not work, although the same setup on my desktop workled fine. "grails help" would report a "C:\grails does not appear to be part of a Grails application" problem. Investigation by putting echos to report the content of variables in the startGrails.bat file revealed that the CLASSPATH environment variable on my PC contained double quotes, i.e. "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_09\QTJava.zip" Removing the double quotes from the environment variable fixed the problem. It is suggested that the startGrails.bat file is enhanced so that double quotes are stripped when putting together the %CP% variable, or that the java scripts that are called handle double quotes within the CP string.