does windows have a limitation when a process started by a scheduled task under one set of creds runs another program under a different set of Creds
c#, powershell, scheduled-tasks
Solution
I'm running in the same issue (powershell start-process fails with exit code -1073741502 when run through a service).
Apparently this is related to this issue: Why is this process crashing as soon as it is launched?
Process.Start internally calls CreateProcessWithLogonW(CPLW) when credentials are specified. CreateProcessWithLogonW cannot be called from a Windows Service Environment (such as an IIS WCF service). It can only be called from an Interactive Process (an application launched by a user who logged on via CTRL-ALT-DELETE).
I guess it's something similar when you are running a scheduled task, it's run in a Windows Service Environment. Probably the API native calls you are inducing are prevented to be run from a service.
Problem
So i have a simple example, where i have app A, which has some hard coded creds to user X , a local admin, and then it launches app B with those Credentials using a hardcoded absolute path. Both A and B and dotnet console applications, however they don't interact with the console, just just write out info to a file. When i run A interactively (under my Creds, by double clicking, or through CMD.exe , or an interactive PowerShell session it runs fine. successfully calling B When i run it through a scheduled tasks with A being under by creds, and calling B with user X the error code of the Process.Start(mystartinfo) is -1073741502 or 0xC0000142 in hex which means "The application failed to initialize properly" However if i run the scheduled task calling A with user X credentials it works.. I made this small test mostly because i see similar behaviour when trying to do "start-job -Credential" in powershell from either a scheduled task or remoting, or calling start-process in powershell or System.Diagnostic>Process.Start from within PowerShell in the same scenarios. At first i thought it was a bug in PowerShell but it seems to be deeper.. Either Windows or specifically Dotnet and i want to know if this is known/documented and if there are any workarounds.