Why do weekly tasks created via PowerShell using a different user fail with error 0x41306

Question

We have some scripts that create scheduled jobs using PowerShell as part of our application. When testing them recently, I noticed that some of them always failed immediately, and no output is ever produced (they don't even appear in the Get-Job list).

After many days of tweaking, we've managed to isolate it to any jobs that are set to run weekly. Below is a script that creates two jobs that do exactly the same thing. When we run this on our domain, and provide credentials of a domain user, then force both jobs to run in the Task Scheduler GUI (right-click -> Run), the daily one runs fine (0x0 result) and the weekly one fails (0x41306).

Note: If I don't provide the -Credential param, both jobs work fine. The jobs only fail if the task is both weekly, and running as this domain user.

I can't find information on why this is happening, nor think of any reason it would behave differently for weekly jobs. The "History£ tab in the Task Scheduler has almost no useful information, just "Task stopping due to user request" and "Task terminated", both of which have no useful info:

Task Scheduler terminated "{eabba479-f8fc-4f0e-bf5e-053dfbfe9f62}" instance of the "\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs\Test1" task. Task Scheduler stopped instance "{eabba479-f8fc-4f0e-bf5e-053dfbfe9f62}" of task "\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs\Test1" as request by user "MyDomain\SomeUser" .

What's up with this? Why do weekly tasks run differently, and how can I diganose this issue?

This is PowerShell v3 on Windows Server 2008 R2. I've been unable to reproduce this locally, but I don't have a user set up in the same way as the one in our production domain (I'm working on this, but I wanted to post this ASAP in the hope someone knows what's happening!).

Import-Module PSScheduledJob

$Action =
{
    "Executing job!"
}

$cred = Get-Credential "MyDomain\SomeUser"

# Remove previous versions (to allow re-running this script)
Get-ScheduledJob Test1 | Unregister-ScheduledJob
Get-ScheduledJob Test2 | Unregister-ScheduledJob

# Create two identical jobs, with different triggers
Register-ScheduledJob "Test1" -ScriptBlock $Action -Credential $cred -Trigger (New-JobTrigger -Weekly -At 1:25am -DaysOfWeek Sunday)
Register-ScheduledJob "Test2" -ScriptBlock $Action -Credential $cred -Trigger (New-JobTrigger -Daily -At 1:25am)

Edit: Added to Connect as suggested by snover:

https://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/776801/weekly-tasks-created-via-powershell-using-a-different-user-immediately-fail-with-error-0x41306

Edit: Some additional info from Jeff Hicks

I used your code to create the same jobs on my 2008 R2 box running PS v3. Both jobs ran fine from PowerShell using Start-Job. But in the GUI, I got the same error for the weekly job.

I get the same result on Windows 8. Something is telling the task service to abort. I tested some other settings but they had no effect. I looked through all of the logs I could think of and all they show is the job starting, PowerShell loading and then the task scheduler cancelling.

I reset the weekly task to run today a little bit ago and it still failed. I also tested a weekly task doing something other than PowerShell and it ran just fine.

I changed the weekly job to use the same account as the current user and it ran just fine. Changed it back to the other account and it failed again. I have no idea about the correlation between the trigger and account.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem when creating scheduled task but I don't remember if it was based on the day schedule. I found changing over to gMSA account to run our scheduled task? Which allowed us to set the task to run whether the user was logged on or not. Otherwise you must provide username and password and cannot have the option of user logged on or not.

Answer 2

i finally found the solution to this behaviour. I scheduled a task to be executed every sunday to run a powershell script. The script on its own ran fine. Then I tried to start it manually in task scheduler. This ended in error 41306. After reading your comments here I changed the schedule not to first run the next sunday but to start on the last sunday (so the start date is in the past). After that I could immediately start it without any problem.