How can I open "special locations" in Windows, like "Control Panel" from the command line?

Just run control.

Control Panel items typically have a registered applet name associated with them. You will have to consult the documentation for the third party items or do a search for them.

Here you can find a list of the more common control panel applet shortcuts. For NVIDIA it lists nvidia.cpl to access the nvidia control panel, which I can confirm is working on my Windows 7 system. In at least some systems it is nvcpl.cpl. Another handy one to run from the command line is sysdm.cpl which brings up the system properties.

This is easier than you can think, you just need to know the correct name of the control panel application.

The control panel applications are typically files with a .CPL extension in the Windows directory.

There are far too many of them, and they can vary depending on what is installed.

Wikipedia has a nice list of the official Windows ones and many of the bigger third part applcations.

In order to find them all, you can go to the command prompt and make sure to be in the root of the system drive and type

dir *.cpl /s

This will list all the control panel files on your machine.

So to run the Nvidia control panel, according to the Wikipedia link, you would type nvidia.cpl as long as the location of the file is pathed. (I cannot test this as I only have ATI cards here at the moment)