Meld Windows shows error on startup "There was a problem starting c:\Program"

I am running Meld 3.18.2 on Windows 7 64-bit, installed with the binary installer program downloaded from meldmerge.org.

Whenever I start Meld, I get a dialog box with title "RunDLL" and message "There was a problem starting c:\Program. The specified module could not be found". The main window then appears after a delay, whether or not I dismiss the dialogue box by clicking its "OK" button.

Looking in the Windows Task Manager while the dialog box is open, I notice there is a process whose command line is:

"C:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe" c:\Program Files (x86)\Meld\LIBGIO~1.DLL,g_win32_run_session_bus@16

It looks like a simple case of missing quotation marks around the argument. The use of a short file name (LIBGIO~1.DLL rather than libgio-2.0-0.dll) is also weird and probably fragile (I think Windows Servers have short file names disabled, and client versions probably will too one day).

Just as a footnote, this blog post by Windows expert/legend Raymond Chen says that Rundll32 is deprecated and should never be used. Also, Meld seems to work fine on my machine (except that it takes five seconds to start), even though this command fails. So perhaps it's worth considering taking it out altogether.