Scheduled tasks randomly fail to start and return 0x80 result codes
Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 10:53 am
Posted by Jordan Rieger
(1 messages posted)
We have a Windows 2003 server that runs our background business processes. It has
many relatively short-running applications setup to execute through Scheduled Tasks.
Recently (and we can't find any change that triggered this) some tasks have been
randomly failing to start, returning a 0x80 code in the "Last Result" column of the
Scheduled Tasks window (when viewed in Details mode.)
The Scheduled Tasks log file (Advanced > View Log) doesn’t provide anything besides
this same error code.
If you run the tasks manually by right-clicking them in the Scheduled Tasks window
and clicking Run, they work. They also work when running the associated commands
manually through a command prompt. But they return the 0x80 result code when they
are allowed to run on schedule.
To isolate the problem, as suggested by other forums posts with similar issues, I
created a test.cmd batch file which writes to a text file using the echo command,
scheduled this batch file, and reproduced the issue. When the 0x80 issue occurs,
the batch file does not run at all (no text file is created.)
I found a few Microsoft Knowledge Base articles which don't seem to apply directly
to our situation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843280/en-us
and http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;812400
(we are running 2K3, not XP, and the tasks are not scheduled through the command-line
AT.EXE tool.)
It seems that if the user who is setup to run the scheduled task is currently logged
on, the task will run properly on schedule. But if that user is logged out, the
task will get the 0x80 error. Currently all the tasks are set to run under a local
administrator account, but the same behavior is observed when they are set to run
under a domain administrator account.
The Task Scheduler service is set to run under the Local System account and is allowed
to logon interactively.
We are now considering the possibility that it might be a resource issue, as suggested
by http://www.mabuse.de/blog/2008/07/on_scheduled_tasks.html.
Our average CPU usage is low and Task Manager reports about 750M free physical memory.
There are around 80~90 processes typically running, a large portion of which are
services that perform automated business processing. We have tried restarting both
the Task Scheduler service and the machine; neither resolved the issue, but restarting
the machine temporarily fixed it.
Any ideas?
Jordan Rieger
Software Developer
RIPE B2B Inc.
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