System, exec different behaviour with spaces

sacambs has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm seeing some odd behaviour when running an exec command on an executable whose path contains spaces, for some reason part of the command name seems to be passed as an argument to the program. Oddly this doesn't happen if I use system instead of exec. The docs for exec suggest that since I'm passing an argument list there should be no shell interpretation, so I can't figure out why this would be happening.

>perl -e "exec 'c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_22\bin\java.exe','-vers
+ion'"

D:\Subversion\FastQC\bin>Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassD
+efFoundError: Files\Java\jdk1/5/0_22\bin\java/exe

>perl -e "system 'c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_22\bin\java.exe','-ve
+rsion'"
java version "1.5.0_22"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_22-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.5.0_22-b03, mixed mode)
[download]

The java error from the exec shows that the correct binary is being called, but that its first argument is everything after the space in the program path. What do I need to do to the exec command so that the only argument the called program sees is the one I explicitly passed it?

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