[windows-7] why windows 7 task scheduler task fails with error 2147942667

I am facing a strange problem. I have scheduled a task to lauch a batch file. When I run the task with option Run only when user is logged on everything works fine. but I want to run this task in background and hence i am running it using the option Run whether user is logged on or not. Now when i run the task it is not working. I get following 2 errors. I don't understand this error. Please help me resolve this issue.

 Task Scheduler failed to launch action "C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\cmd.exe" in instance "{2a7cc950-fad9-4633-9701-af75a0fd220d}" of task "\stmm\Daemon". Additional Data: Error Value: 2147942667.
 Task Scheduler failed to start instance "{2a7cc950-fad9-4633-9701-af75a0fd220d}" of "\stmm\Daemon"  task for user "GBLADHEDANI\N011940" . Additional Data: Error Value: 2147942667.

This question is related to windows-7 scheduled-tasks

The answer is


I had the same problem, on Windows7.

I was getting error 2147942667 and a report of being unable to run c:\windows\system32\CMD.EXE. I tried with and without double quotes in the Script and Start-in and it made no difference. Then I tried replacing all path references to mapped network drives and with UNC references (\Server1\Sharexx\my_scripts\run_this.cmd) and that fixed it for me. Pat.


For a more generic answer, convert the error value to hex, then lookup the hex value at Windows Task Scheduler Error and Success Constants


For me it was the "Start In" - I copied the values from an older server, and updated the path to the new .exe location, but I forgot to update the "start in" location - if it doesn't exist, you get this error too

Quoting @hans-passant 's comment from above, because it is valuable to debugging this issue:

Convert the error code to hex to get 0x8007010B. The 7 makes it a Windows error. Which makes 010B error code 267. "The directory name is invalid". Sure, that happens.


This can happen for more than one reason. In my case this happened due to a permissions issue. The user that the task was running as didn't have permission to write to the logs directory so it failed with this error.


For me, this was due to the user PATH environment variable, which didn't seem to work even though the user was correct, so I needed to put the entire executable path into the program field.


For me it was the "Start In" - I accidentally left in the '.py' at the end of the name of my program. And I forgot to capitalize the name of the folder it was in ('Apps').