Property values are passed to java via -D parameter and surrounding the full string with quotes, however trailing "\" will escape the quote and, thus brake the command line. e.g. while trying to mimic IDEA build, I set up jdk.home.idea_jdk to something like c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_08\ and got error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: XP ... for command line like: java.exe ... "-Djdk.IDEA jdk.home=c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_08\" "-Dos.name=Windows XP" ... Seems, we should consider various escaping issues...