About every three months, my Scheduled Tasks do not run, the Task Scheduler says "could not start". I've tried stopping and starting the scheduler service then manually strating a task, but the task does not run. When I go in and set the password, then re-run the task, it is all good. Here's the kicker....the password has never changed, ever. But every few months I've had to reapply the password to the scheduled tasks. How strange is this? Anyone see this before, or know where I can begin to search? I tried google, support.msft.com, and this awesome site, but no answers yet.

I don't have an answer for you, nut the same thing happens to me on my win2k server box. We just retype the password & it works. There is not any event logging to say why or any error message that indicates a wrong password. Our passwords have not changed???

I FOUND IT! Daylight Saving Time That's right....searching Google for hours on end, I've read about someone having a problem with his XP Pro and scheduled tasks everytime the time changes. This is an undocumented bug with Windows, since it occurs on my NT Server, but no other pc's on my network. It occured on Brian's Win2k (see above), and it occurs on XP Pro. Amazing, yet, a relief.

We are having the same problem but much more seriously. We have a task which runs once then fails the next time with cannot start task. If we re-enter the password, the same thing happens. Sometimes, it will run a few times before failing. This is definitely not to do with Daylight Savings but could it be to do with time in some way?

We have found the solution to our problem. We changed the local security policy to allow the user to login locally and to start batch jobs. (The fact that this users group already had these privileges didn't seem to work) Hope this helps. Of course, now the mystery is why did the job ever work if the security policy should have stopped it? And why does it work again when you re-enter the password.