Scheduled tasks password problem

[Tim]

I've read the KB articles saying that the user and the
task both need a password in order to run the task.

But I need to figure out how to bypass that, as my
customers don't have user passwords and don't want them.
I believe there must be some way to do it, because I
successfully set up some tasks on one XP Pro system, with
no passwords, before I even knew this was an issue. And,
on the XP computers that say I must have a password, even
those have tasks which were automatically set up by Norton
antivirus, for example, which run just fine even though
the user has no password, and the scheduled task has no
password.

How do they do it? How can I do it?

 

[Roger Abell]

Are you certain that the tasks within Norton that you mention
are not handled internally in the Norton code using its services
rather that being scheduled tasks with the OS's task manager ?
You could try adjusting the security policies governing account
passwords, and making sure the account used is granted the
right to log on as a batch process, but I doubt you will find
success.
Why not just define an account with a password that is used
for the scheduled tasks ?? This is what I do as a standard
practice anyway, rather than schedule tasks under some account
that is in normal use, since as soon as someone changes the
password on the account the tasks stop. With a dedicated account
you know, when you change pwd you need to change it everywhere.

 

[Tim]

Thank you. That does work, but the task does not run "in"
the user I'm logged into, which is not ideal. I did a
test: I am logged in as Tim, with no passwords on my
administrative user account. I added a user named Back1,
with a password of Back2, then logged back into user Tim.
Then, I set up a task that runs a simple batch file that
copies files from one folder to another. At the assigned
time, it did run just fine, but I never saw it, so I'm
assuming it ran in the background, essentially in user
Back1's user area? And this would be fine, if all goes
well, but what if I have an error?

My goal is to allow the user to stay logged in all day
with his usual user name, with no password required, and
be able to have tasks that run even with no password. The
reason I mentioned norton is because the automatic virus
scan that norton setup for me is listed as a task on the
list of scheduled tasks. It's properties show no
password, and indeed, it runs on my user account, which
has no passwords. Why can't I set up a task that will do
the same?

 

[Roger Abell]

You cannot use task scheduler to run in context of an
account that has no password. This is disallowed.
What does it matter what account the task runs as,
as long as it runs? You can always look in the Scheduled
Tasks applet and see if it was successful that last time it
ran. Also, schedule tasks should not have any user interaction,
or interface. They should run as batch without any interface.
If you task is C:\tasks\mybatch.bat set it up to run as
C:\tasks\mybatch.bat >> c:\tasks\myresults.txt
if you want to generate some output.