Hi Mandy,
I would bet that there are some spaces in your variables.
BTW, you should avoid using reserved words like SYSTEM as file names or directory names. It might confuse the computer or the human.
Here's another suggestion which might help you track down the problem. Instead of coding a line like \abc&MyVariable, create 1 big variable for the entire expression. In this case, it would be "\abc" plus the contents of MyVariable. Then, if you are still getting error messages, you can check the contents of the big variable prior to executing the SQL SELECT statement.
Does this help?
Regards, Chaim