>>> print myfile
E:\Fritz Reiner\Rimsky-Korsakov--Scheherazade.Debussy--La Mer\01
Symphonic Suite after "A Thousand and One Nights" - The Sea and Sinbad's
Ship.ogg

 >>> os.path.isfile(myfile)
True
 >>> os.path.getsize(myfile)
12321468L
 >>> shutil.copy2(myfile,r'D:\foo.ogg')
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<input>", line 1, in ?
   File "C:\Python23\Lib\shutil.py", line 82, in copy2
     copyfile(src, dst)
   File "C:\Python23\Lib\shutil.py", line 37, in copyfile
     fsrc = open(src, 'rb')
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'E:\\Fritz
Reiner\\Rimsky-Korsakov--Scheherazade.Debussy--La Mer\\01 Symphonic
Suite after "A Thousand and One Nights" - The Sea and Sinbad\'s Ship.ogg'
 >>> shutil.copy(myfile,r'D:\foo.ogg')
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<input>", line 1, in ?
   File "C:\Python23\Lib\shutil.py", line 71, in copy
     copyfile(src, dst)
   File "C:\Python23\Lib\shutil.py", line 37, in copyfile
     fsrc = open(src, 'rb')
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'E:\\Fritz
Reiner\\Rimsky-Korsakov--Scheherazade.Debussy--La Mer\\01 Symphonic
Suite after "A Thousand and One Nights" - The Sea and Sinbad\'s Ship.ogg'

Must have CD, btw, for you Fritz Reiner fans ... and yes I do own the cd ;)

    shutil.copy2(myfile,r'D:\foo.ogg')

can't use the string held in myfile, although os.listdir('directory on
CD') contains it as the first entry.

It would be nice if I could referene the file in a way that would not
cause the copy command to fail.

G:\>python
 >>> import os
 >>> os.path.isfile('This is a "test" file')
True
 >>> os.path.isfile('This is a "test" filex')   # just testing
False
 >>> import shutil
 >>> shutil.copy('This is a "test" file', r'c:\test.txt')
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
   File "c:\a\python23\lib\shutil.py", line 71, in copy
     copyfile(src, dst)
   File "c:\a\python23\lib\shutil.py", line 37, in copyfile
     fsrc = open(src, 'rb')
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'This is a "test" file'

Perhaps your only option for now, since it seems shutil.copy
uses the underlying OS copy and that barfs on Windows, is to
open the file and copy it the hard way:

 >>> data = file('This is a "test" file').read()
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'This is a "test" file'

Ouch!  That doesn't work either. ;-)

Okay, any reason not to call this a bug in the Windows version of
Python, when os.path.isfile can handle the name but Python can't
open or copy the file?

Note that os.listdir() on my machine shows the 8.3 format name
even though apparently on Stephen's CD it does not:

 >>> os.listdir('.')
['peter', 'im', 'THISI~LT', 'quicken.old']

(Stephen, I think therein lies your solution for now though, which
is to find the 8.3 format name with, say, "DIR /x" or maybe
win32api.GetShortPathName (if that even works) and copy it that
way.)

"dir /x" gives me "01SYMP~2.OGG" as the short file name, "dir
01SYMP~2.OGG" does echo back the file name, but "copy 01SYMP~2.OGG"
gives me a "The system cannot find the file specified" error.

Oh well, I'll just redo it with a different file name.

I did burn the CD under linux, with k3b as a front end to cdrecord,
using joliet extensions with 128 character file names enabled.