Hi Fwall4;
What I believe you're seeing is that WD acts as a Super Scheduler for the
MP Scheduled Scan Task. By that I mean because of the way WD was designed
to interface with the Task Scheduler facility, it's necessary for WD to
first cancel any scheduled MP Scheduled Scan task and then re-schedule it
based on the value that you've set in options, that avoids having multiple
scans scheduled at different times if you were to change the time in
Options that you want the scan to run. The evidence for this is only in
observation, I've not seen the code, but here's what I have seen...
During the course of the Beta people complained about a balloon popup
notifying them that Defender (MpCmdRun.exe) was making an application
registration change shortly after startup, this was obviously due to
rebooking the MP Scheduled Scan. If you change the name of the task and
schedule it yourself outside the Options internal to Defender, this task
runs and logs that run as you would expect. The task as run through
Options does not always run at the exact time you've selected, but does run
within an hour plus or minus of that time, however a scan task scheduled
outside of Defender directly through the Task Scheduler runs at the exact
time specified... so what I think you're seeing is the Defender code itself
doing that run time variation NOT the Task Scheduler function of Windows.
Somewhere a Ms programmer is probably laughing at my explanation of his
complex work on hundreds of lines of code... but that's generally what I
think the explanation is... and yes, it does occur on my machine as well as
yours. It only becomes an annoyance if you get the popup alerts which can
be eliminated fortunately.
