Make on XP - shell selection?

I've used make on windows for quite a while - I use it for all sorts of non-compilation tasks, and my makefiles tend to occasionally use dos-type commands - e.g if exist ...

It all worked perfectly until I installed a compiler that put a sh shell on my path. Since then all my makefiles are broken.
Make appears to insist on using the sh shell buried on my path rather than cmd.exe 
I've tried explicitly putting SHELL = cmd.exe in my makefiles - but that didn't seem to work. Putting SHELL = c:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe seems to sort-of work, but then all sorts of other errors come up.

Is there a simple way (other than changing my path before running make) to keep all my makefiles that worked perfectly well before working?

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