[lharms]

Although thinking about it some more, disabling auto-update on Windows punishes all Windows users with Python installed as C:\Python37\python.exe, which is sane and works, so the best solution may be for me to do nothing, and you should fix your system by installing Python to C:\Python37, or use the workaround above (disabling checkupdate. Yes, I like this option the best, but thanks for reporting an odd issue!

Yeah I would not expect it to be disabled for the general case. Mine is just slightly odd because of visual studio and one of the install options in python37. I did not have a linux box handy to try out a quick and dirty try. So I was not sure if just going from
os.execl(sys.executable, sys.executable, *args)
to
os.execl(sys.executable, '"' + sys.executable + '"', *args) # that is singlequote doublequote singlequote
would work there. I know it would on windows. I have run into issues like this in the past with python and windows/linux/threadx. Where the code is 'right' but the libs act slightly different as the OS they sit on are slightly different. Usually something in the os library. Most annoying.

I say just let it error out as it does the download and I can just retry the command. No biggie. I may experiment with it a bit and see if I can get it to work with both better. This usually involves fiddling heavily with the way strings are quoted on each system and finding one both like.