Scheduled tasks do not run after your system modifies the time setting to daylight time in Windows 2000 and in Windows NT (826895)

SYMPTOMS

After your system modifies the time setting on your computer to daylight time, scheduled tasks that are configured to run by the administrator do not run. Additionally, the Run As dialog box in the task properties displays a blank user name or the user name of the current user. You expect this dialog box to display "administrator." If you set the user name and the password back to their original values, the scheduled tasks run as expected.

When this problem occurs, entries that are similar to the following appear in the Schedlgu.txt file in the Windows systemroot folder:

The attempt to retrieve account information for the specified task failed; therefore, the task did not run. Either an error occurred, or no account information existed for the task. The specific error is: 0x8004130f: No account information could be found in the Task Scheduler security database for the task indicated.

The systemroot folder is typically C:\Winnt.

CAUSE

This problem may occur if both of the following conditions are true:

The system partition of your computer is configured to use the FAT file system.
The time on your computer changes to reflect daylight time.

This problem is generated by the hash that is used for the account password for the scheduled tasks. The Task Scheduler service creates a .job file that contains the task information for each task. Several variables are used to hash the account password. One of these variables is the timestamp of the .job file. On the NTFS file system, the timestamp is static and is reported to the user based on the current time zone; the change to daylight time does not actually modify the file attributes. For example, if you create a file at 19:00 Pacific Time, a user in the Central Time zone sees a file creation time of 21:00. However, on the FAT file system, all files have their timestamps changed after the change to daylight time. When this timestamp change occurs, the password hash no longer matches, and therefore the .job file does not run.

RESOLUTION

Microsoft Windows NT 4.0

To resolve this problem on a Windows NT 4.0-based computer, upgrade your computer to Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) or later, or you can convert the system partition to NTFS. If you convert the system partition to NTFS, this problem does not occur because the .job file is not modified.

For additional information about how to convert a partition to the NTFS file system, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

214579 How to use Convert.exe to convert a partition to the NTFS file system

Microsoft Windows 2000

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

260910 How to obtain the latest Windows 2000 service pack

For additional information about this problem on a Windows 2000-based computer, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

328773 Task scheduler jobs do not work and generate error code 0x8004130f intermittently

MORE INFORMATION

This problem occurs only with the Task Scheduler service that is included with Windows 2000 or later or with the Task Scheduler service that is installed as an upgrade on Windows NT 4.0-based computers that are running updated versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. This problem does not occur with the original Windows NT 4.0 Task Scheduler service.