I believe that drilling into SQLite's behavior will reveal only a dry hole with respect to this problem. As I said, sqlite3.exe is an ordinary console program like many other thousands. I am not quite a SQLite technical expert, having spent only a few weeks of effort in the shell code, but I have been a software developer for decades and know that when a program relies upon the standard C library for its I/O, as sqlite3.exe does, that there is virtually no prospect of discovering that it is responsible for the problems you describe. In addition to the malware check I suggested earlier, I suggest you take a look at what is being loaded when you launch a sqlite3.exe process, using the [free DLL Dependency Walker](http://dependencywalker.com/). Do this on a system that "works" and on a system that "fails to carry out commands and exit", taking care to note the location of the various DLLs that are loaded, including the (putative) system DLLs. The "official" distributed sqlite3.exe has no DLL dependencies except for system DLLs, which should all be found in a system directory. (The Dependency Walker shows which DLLs from what locations are loaded according the the actual DLL file resolution rules.) I presume that, before you do this, you will have followed Simon's advice to get a fresh copy of the executable. Your problem is specific to a small set of machines, not to SQLite.