opatch problem on Windows

There is a note in Metalink that explains that on Windows having space characters in your ORACLE_HOME variable, the patch location or JDK location causes an error when running opatch. Yesterday I saw a strange problem that is similar to the above case.

If your opatch directory contains space characters you get a strange error. Even if the above conditions were not present we got an error like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\test\Desktop\OPatch>opatch lsinventory
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: and

OPatch failed with error code = 1

Metalink returns no results for this error. This error is caused by the space characters in "Documents and Settings". When you move the opatch directory to another directory which does not contain space in its name opatch runs without this problem.

Just a note to help in case someone gets the same error.