No the CMD shell does not pop open. I use it all the time. The only reason you might see it is if you don't redirect it to nul or if it's just some odd behaving application that spews junk no matter what.

Here is an example
 Code:
SHELL '%COMSPEC% /C "\\MYSERVER\SHARE2\WHOAMI.EXE" >NUL 2>NUL'