Thanks guys, both options work
Going with spindles just cause it matches the rest of the file nicely. You guys rock!
edit: and now I've got one more minor problem with this thing. I can't get the cmd.exe window to close at the end of starting all of the files (it wants to stay open until I CLOSE all of the files for some reason). I'm using a really sloppy format that looks like "c:\program"|"c:\program"|etc. I initialy tried having seperate lines, but the batch would pause after each program, waiting for me to close the one it opened before starting the new one.
Probably something easy here, but I haven't touched .bats since dos 6.0 really. And every time I google I'm not getting the answers