Scheduled tasks not running in Windows 2003 Server Domain Controller

I’ve a couple of virtualised DC’s in the farm that (to make AD restore much easier) do a daily backup to a second partition which then gets farmed out for protection.

The purpose is that when you start a VM in DRSM mode access to backups is, ahem, somewhat tricky.  So by having a partition within the machine with the latest backup (or a restored copy of an earlier one…) can mean a simple NTBACKUP restore can be swiftly executed to give peace in our time.

Well… for some time one of the machines had tasks in scheduled tasks that “Could not start”, and as an added function when you inspected the task properties you’d be prevented by error 0x8009016.

Now there are oodles of ideas out there, and over the past few months (yes, months) when I found time I would give it a go.

Finally today, it seems to be fixed.

Solution Pointer:

Was suggested at http://www.winserverkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/windows-server-sbs/75703/80090016-keyset-doesnot-exist although this is for SBS 2003…

Method:

Taking the hint about stopping services, I went for broke and ran this PowerShell command

# stop all running services

Get-Service * | where {$_.status -eq "Running"} | Stop-Service –Force

Thus the server was reduced to absolute minimum of operating features.

Then taking step 6 on its own

“Delete all of the files in the ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18’ folder”

But I did (and do recommend) take the more precautious approach of renaming the single file contained therein.

Then a start of all the automatic services by

# start Automatic services that are not Running:

Get-WmiObject Win32_Service | Where-Object { $_.StartMode -eq 'Auto' -and $_.State -ne 'Running' } | start-service

And tried to inspect a task’s properties, and it failed.

On further inspection I found the RSA folder was still empty, so decided a reboot would be worth it.

After the reboot, the RSA folder was populated, the task properties were available again, but the task would not run.  A quick delete and re-create of the task and Robert was my mother’s brother again.

Phew!