OK, just wanted to follow up on this. It seems that my issue was the amount of ram in the system. Not sure why sha256 seems to work but scrypt will not. Oh well.
I had 1gb and couldn’t get any scrypt mining to work. I swapped some stuff around and with 2gb I am able to get it mining using .conf files. It still will not run if I try to launch using .bat files with flags like I originally was. Fails with the same error as is posted above.
Anyway, I am just posting this in case anyone else comes across this as I was unable to find any good info on this specific error.