Version: Norten Internet Security 18.6.0.29
Operating systems: Windows Vista Business, Windows 7 Professional
Hi!
We use the Task Scheduler in Windows to start up some programs every weekday early in the morning, typically 06:00 AM (Norwegian time). Some mornings, we've noticed that the scheduled program on one or more computers hasn't started -- but then it typically starts within a few hours, but much later than the time scheduled.
At first, we thought there was something fishy with the Task Scheduler itself, but then we looked closer at the histories for all the tasks in the Task Scheduler. We then found that every time one of our tasks had run later than it should, a Symantec task called "Norton Error Processor 18.0.6.29" had run a few seconds earlier.
Checking out the "Norton Error Processor 18.0.6.29" task, it is scheduled to run at 01:00 every day -- but with a random delay of "up to 8 hours". Could it be that this Symantec task in some way causes the other tasks, that are scheduled after it, to wait until it is completed?
It is a bit hard to do controlled experiments with this, since the random delay for the Symantec task is, well, random -- but when we've changed the random delay to "up to 1 hour", the problem seems to disappear...
...that is, until NIS is updated, and the "up to 8 hours" is back again, without us noticing until our programs start up belatedly again. :-(
Does anyone have any light to shed on this?