First I start up eshell then I enter the command cd /plink:<user>@<host>:/home/

then I get this error message

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. The command prompt has been disabled by your administrator. Press any key to continue . . .

I am trying to connect with plink (which is in my path), also after going through the *Messages* buffer I found this.

Couldn't find local shell prompt for (C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe)

I'm 90% sure that this is because the cmd has been disabled on my machine, because when I try the same setup on a different computer, where I know the cmd is enabled, everything works.

I've modify my .emacs file to have

(require 'tramp) (set 'tramp-encoding-shell "C:/Windows/System32/WindowsPowershell/v1.0/powershell.exe") (set 'tramp-encoding-command-switch "-Command")

I get different results, however the results appear to be scrambled nonsense (the third line looks like it could be a prompt, the \ and > characters are in the correct places...).

I managed to dig up a pretty good description of what tramp-encoding-shell is, there's also a related SO question, and here is the tramp-encoding-shell source/documentation on github.

Update

Here is what my screen looks like after trying to unsuccessfully open a plink connection with powershell set as the tramp-encoding-shell.