A curious issue has popped up on my Windows 2003 R2 SP2 server. First some background:
There are many legacy MS-Access 2003 "applications" I must support. These applications not only update databases, they also do file operations and other "automation" processes.
These applications are scheduled using the good-old Scheduled Tasks app. The way the scheduled tasks are set up is using the link to MS-Access in the start menu. with the .MDB file for each app as an argument, as follows (with sensitive info using generic terms):
Run: "C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office\Microsoft Office Access 2003.lnk" M:\Automated\AccessApp1.md
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Start In: "C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\ Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office"
Run As: <doman>\<user>
Note that the location of the MDB is on a mapped drive on another server.
Apparently it's necessary to have the scheduled task using the start menu link instead of the actual EXE file for some oddball reason I haven't had the time or energy to research. This is the way they were when I inherited them.
That said, normally they will run in the foreground, and if you watch with Process Explorer, they'll be underneath the Windows Explorer instance where all the other foreground apps run.
On rare occasions when someone not knowing better did not log in the server with the user ID so the foreground was established, the apps would try to run under svchost, but would get nowhere because they rely on mapped drives, which are unavailable if you don't have the desktop active, but that's not the case here.
This past weekend, every day, they all instantiated under svchost running under rundll32.exe, ran to completion, but left the task hanging there. The server was logged in as normally, but this odd thing happened. Nothing in the event logs indicate anything out of the ordinary. All of the instances were still sitting there Monday, yet were complete.
The command line for the svchost rundll instances look like the following (from the "command line" field of Process Explorer):
RUNDLL32.EXE Shell32.dll, ShellExec_RunDLL ?0x400?"C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\Programs\Microsoft Office\Microsoft Office Access 2003.lnk" M:\Automated\AccessApp1.md
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The Question: What might cause this to happen?
