Windows XP: command != cmd

So I was trying to help one of my good friends get started with Django today. He managed to get Python and the development version of Django installed, but once he tried to actually start working on a project he ran into some strange problems. In the command prompt, he changed to the directory where he wanted to create his Django projects and tried to run the appropriate command to actually create one. It came back telling him it was and invalid command and all that. We checked the paths and whatnot, and everything seemed perfectly fine.

After a little bit of further tinkering, we agreed to let me use LogMeIn to try to figure out what the problem was. When I got into his computer, he had his command prompt open. Everything was a bit fishy--no tab-completion, 8-character file and directory names, all upper-case names, etc. At first I just assumed that he was using an older version of Windows XP. I was personally not aware that XP shipped with such outdated capabilities, so it was a big surprise for me.

Eventually, I decided to open another command prompt, and I noticed that the file names were all long and properly-cased. Tab completion also worked. Turns out that my buddy opened the command prompt using Start > Run: command.com, while I used cmd.exe. Strange that the legacy command prompt is still included in XP.

So if anyone else runs into similar problems, check which method you're using to open the command prompt.