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:
- Stopped the task scheduler service (right-clicked "Task Scheduler" in the Services window from Control Panel and selected "Stop").
- Restarted the task scheduler service
- Waited 15 minutes
- 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.