Windows – Error 0xE0434F4D as ‘Last Run Result’ of a Windows Scheduled Task

Troubleshooting scheduled scripts:

1. If you haven't already, check the Scheduled Tasks log file, in the GUI under Advanced > View Log. Search the file for "***" to find the most recent entries, and you may see a little extra error info.

2. Define a log file to capture output, and send both standard out and standard error there. Change any echo OFF to echo ON to be sure you're not supressing any error messages.
   For example, if your script is called ftp.data.cmd then your scheduled task might look like this,

   cmd /c ftp.data.cmd >> ftp.data.log 2>&1

3. Is the script hanging? Maybe the task scheduler is killing the script (hence the CTRL+C error code) after some specified period of time. Add some of these at strategic points in your scipt,

   echo %DATE% %TIME%

4. Are you sure the account running the script has permissions / access to everything in the script?

5. If you can't get any joy, run this command and post the output here, maybe we can start with the scheduling,

   schtasks /query /v /fo LIST /s YOURSERVER

It appears that there is more than just "regular" process priority at work here. As I noted in the question, the task scheduler by default runs your task at lower than normal priority. This question on StackOverflow describes how to fix any task to run at Normal priority, but the fix still leaves one thing slightly different: memory priority. Memory priority was a new feature for Windows Vista, and is described in this Technet article. You can see memory priority using Process Explorer, which is a must-have tool for any administrator or programmer.

Anyway, even with the scheduled task priority fix, the memory priority of your task is set to 4, which is one notch below the normal setting of 5. When I manually boosted the memory priority of my task up to 5, the performance was on par with running the process interactively.

For info on boosting the priority, see my answer to a related StackOverflow question about IO priority; setting memory priority is done similarly, via NtSetInformationProcess, with PROCESS_INFORMATION_CLASS set to ProcessMemoryPriority (the value of this is 39 or 0x27). I might make a free utility that can be used to set this, if others need it and don't have access to programmer tools.

EDIT: I've gone ahead and written a free utility for querying and setting the memory priority of a task, available here. The download contains both source code and a compiled binary.