Gosh. And here I was feeling guilty at not being able to come back sooner to thank those who came through with the answers. All this knowledge running about and nothing. Not even a "dump DOS and get yourself a REAL shell!"
I guess not many here are silly or unfortunate enough to still fight with the lameness that is WinDOS.
Just to note, I kept mucking about and have a functional workaround that involves mirroring the dir structure of the source dir into the destination dir, then stepping through each level along the way and using MOVE to move the source files from each dir into each new dir, then clearing the empty dir tree from the source location when done. None of that erroneous "access denied" baloney, either.
Also found that the MOVE command has a rather short (<128 byte ?) path dir it will take as a parameter. Forced me to have to move files deep in trees first to a temp dir with a basic/root pathname before moving on to the final destination. Good thing CHDIR doesn't have this same limitation or to the same degree.
Works perfectly, but it's more file/dir manipulation than is sanely necessary for something so damn basic.
Later.
Mansooj