Suddenly cannot run scripts any more

I am having a problem bringing Autoit back to the way it used to be.
I used to run SciTE4AutoIt that comes with the installaion, hit F5 whenever I checked a script and all went fine.
My problems began when I wanted to start using ScitE with XML files (because it could collapse them). Since I didn't see the option to support XML in SciTE4Autoit - I downloaded the full SciTE program. Installed and ran it - all worked fine with XML files.
However - suddenly it started messing things up with the Lite version of SciTE I had. It seemed like it would open au3 scripts in the full SciTE - but would show the status line and all the options as being part of AutoIt - but still show all the supported Languages. Biggest problem - it now failed to run au3 scripts and even color-code them.

So - I reinstalled AutoIt. Still the same problem. I could see now the color highlights - but when I hit F5 on a test script I get:

>"C:\ProgramData\SciTE\..\autoit3.exe" /ErrorStdOut "C:\utils\Autoit_scripts\test.au3"
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
>Exit code: 1	Time: 0.215

I uninstalled AutoIt, uninstalled SciTE, removed all SciTE properites from the user folder, removed c:\ProgramData\SciTE, and finally reinstalled AutoIt.
Again - highlights fine - but get the above error when running.

I tried installing the full SciTE4AutoIt3 - no highlights now and no F5 functionality. Again tried uninstalling and reinstalling AutoIt. Tried adding different addons to SciTEuser.properties that I've found on the net - but nothing seemed to help (or maybe I didn't do it right).

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!