Ok,
What version of MySQL are you using? mysqld-shareware.exe hasn't existed for several release versions now, so you might want to grab the newest distro from www.mysql.com. If you've already grabbed a recent version, that's your problem right there. Use either mysqld.exe, mysqld-nt.exe, or mysqld-opt.exe to start the server.
Second, if you've installed to any location other than c:\mysql, you must place a copy of my.cnf on the c:\ root and ensure that the base_dir directive in my.cnf points to the installation folder for MySQL (use *Nix forward slashes in your path.... it'll save you some grief). You can also specify the directory used to store your database and table files with the data_dir directive. For a full list of available options, execute the following command:
mysqld --help |more
HTH.
geoff
