Windows – ERROR 0x8007007A when trying to schedule a task

scheduled-taskswindows

I am getting the error "The data area passed to a system call is too small. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007A)" when trying to create a scheduled task on a particular windows machine.

The problem description is identical to that described in this Microsoft KB article

I followed their steps to resolve:

  1. Stopped the task scheduler service (right-clicked "Task Scheduler" in the Services window from Control Panel and selected "Stop").
  2. Restarted the task scheduler service
  3. Waited 15 minutes
  4. tried to schedule the task.

But the error is persisting.

To give more context of how we are creating these scheduled tasks, they are actually generated automatically from a configuration script (we run the script each time we wish to make a change). Each time this happens, it deletes all of the existing tasks and creates new ones.

I don't know what else to try…. but surely there is some way to "reset" the task scheduler… How can I stop this error from happening.

Best Answer

After having tried the Microsoft KB work around that didn't help, I stopped the tasks scheduler service then opened a command prompt in C:\Windows\Tasks and typed dir /a.

It listed all my scheduled tasks plus two tasks that were not shown in the Tasks Scheduler UI (for my part two jobs named "At1.job" and "At6083.job").

I just deleted these two files from the prompt, then started the tasks scheduler service, and finally opened the tasks scheduler UI. From this point I could again create tasks normally.

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