Windows Scheduled Tasks losing password configuration

Question

I have a couple of jobs scheduled to run daily on a customer server running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, SP1 using Windows Scheduled Tasks. The tasks are set to run as a user that is in the Administrators group, and were scheduled as that same user. The password of that user is set to never expire. These tasks fail to run pretty much every day. Going into Scheduled Tasks and attempting to run the tasks manually indicates that the password is incorrect. I go into the task properties, retype the password into the appropriate fields, click OK, and attempt to run the task manually again. Now it works fine. What might be the cause of the password being lost like this?

These same tasks are running on other customers servers with no problems.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Solution

Thanks for all of the replies, suggestions, and comments. Despite everything I've tried, I can't get this server to stop losing the password for this user in Scheduled Tasks. I don't really know that it is a policy issue anyway, since the jobs will run after resetting the password in the task's properties. I can do that, reschedule the job for 5 minutes later, and it works. Schedule it to run for 5 hours later, 10 hours later, various different times - sometimes it will run once, maybe, then won't again until the password is reset. So it doesn't seem to be a policy issue, but more an issue that the password configured in the task's properties is getting corrupted or lost for some reason. Scheduling the jobs to run at various different times in an attempt to find some pattern or time frame where the password goes has uncovered nothing. It seems to happen pretty much randomly. I ended up installing CRONw (http://cronw.sourceforge.net/) a perl-based version of the "cron" utility of the *nix world that runs as a Windows service. The scheduled jobs work fine now, so that's my solution, for the time being at least.

Comments

[Frode Lillerud]

We've been struggeling with this for years as well. It disappeared when we reinstalled our entire serverpark. But I'm guessing that is not an option for you ;)

[Shaun Hess]

What error appears in the Schedlgu.txt log in C:\Windows when the task tries to run?

[E Brown]

Thanks for the reply. The "Administrators" group is included in the "Allow log on locally" policy, and as I mentioned in the question, the user that the scheduled task is set to run as is a member of "Administrators" group. I wouldn't think that I would need to add the user name to that policy if the "Administrators" group is already there, but would that be worth a shot? There are no users/groups in the "Deny log on locally" policy.

[E Brown]

Thanks for the reply. Neither the Administrators group nor the user the task is scheduled to run as is in the "Logon as a batch job" group policy. The Administrator account is, but not the Administrators group. I don't have permission to modify policies, but will contact the server admin person to have them try this. Also, I'm not seeing any file named schedlgu.txt anywhere on the server. Is that the correct filename for Windows Server 2003?

[Shaun Hess]

Sorry about that, I corrected the post. In any case you can access the scheduled task log by running: %SystemRoot%\Tasks\SchedLgU.txt.

[E Brown]

Thanks for the update. The error in the log is "0x80070569: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer. Verify that the task's Run-as name and password are valid and try again."

[squillman]

Hey, thanks for the follow-up. Sorry we couldn't come up with something for you!