Scheduled tasks failing to start due to user/password error

[Paul Adams]

There is a PC here with a collection of batch files scheduled to run at various times (daily for the main part, one hourly), and recently it failed to start any of them - the log stating that there was a problem with the username or password.

I picked one of the jobs and re-entered the password then ran it manually - it worked no problem.
I ran tha remaining jobs without changing the authentication details and they all ran flawlessly too.
The (domain) user account was not touched at all, the PC was not logged out or rebooted, the user logged in is the one used to execute the task.

Anyone have any experience like this before and can shed any light on this?
It's got me baffled.

This is a Windows 2000 Professional machine, SP4'd & hotfixed - the last successful run time of the tasks was midday last Friday.

[Moby-Dick]

set up a seperate service account for the tasks and try that ?

[Paul Adams]

We're likely to take this opportunity to create a new account for this, but the thing we cannot explain is why all the jobs are now working once more - the hourly job has run at 9am, 10am and 11am this morning after I manually executed it at 8:50am.

Utterly, utterly baffled.

I could at least begin to make a guess as to what happened if the workstation had lost sight of the domain, or its drive mappings for some of the jobs, or had to be rebooted to get it to work again, or have the password reset on the account... but it just stopped between midday and 1pm last Friday and didn't work again until manually being kicked this morning.

'Tis a strange one alright.
There are times that computers really confuse me