pycharm-selenium-python: Unable to start chromedriver service - [WinError 193] %1 is not a valid Win32 application - selenium

Question

This question is not a duplicate of
error using selenium chromedriver on windows 7 64 bit as I have tried all solutions mentioned there.
In directory env\lib\site-packages\selenium\webdriver\common\service.py, considering the following code in function start
cmd = [self.path]
cmd.extend(self.command_line_args())
self.process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, env=self.env,
close_fds=platform.system() != 'Windows',
stdout=self.log_file, stderr=self.log_file)
The value for cmd is: <class 'list'>: ['chromedriver', '--port=58808']
Within ../AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python35/Lib/subprocess.py function __init__
self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
pass_fds, cwd, env,
startupinfo, creationflags, shell,
p2cread, p2cwrite,
c2pread, c2pwrite,
errread, errwrite,
restore_signals, start_new_session)
args is the only argument passed with value <class 'list'>: ['chromedriver', '--port=58999']
But it raises an exception: [WinError 193] %1 is not a valid Win32 application
This prevents starting of the chromedriver service.
So I changed the args to absolute_path_to_chrome_driver\\chromedriver:
self._execute_child(args, 'absolute_path_to_chrome_driver\\chromedriver', preexec_fn, close_fds,
pass_fds, cwd, env,
startupinfo, creationflags, shell,
p2cread, p2cwrite,
c2pread, c2pwrite,
errread, errwrite,
restore_signals, start_new_session)
But it still raises the same exception: [WinError 193] %1 is not a valid Win32 application
This preventing the launch of chromedriver.
I even downloaded the latest version of chromedriver but ChromeDriver 2.43 (https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/2.43/chromedriver_win32.zip) but the error persists.
Any clues on this one?

Answer 1

Ok so the chromedriver.exe needs to be placed in the ..\env\Scripts folder for this to work - specifying any system path entry did not work here.
When I place anything in over here, I can directly access it by process name. But i cannot use a listed path in system environment variables (or maybe I can but not aware how to :( ).