The problem seems to be that the name of a function in the SHELL command string was being interpretted as its value and not as test.
I can not reproduce the described problem. I wrote this simple script that should reflect the problem as I read it. The script was tested with 4.02 and 4.22.
Code:
;setoption("NoVarsInStrings","ON")
function CMD()
? "in function 'CMD'"
Dim $A
$A = "1","a"
$CMD = $A
endfunction
shell 'CMD /c notepad.exe'
