Schtasks Permission Error on Administrative User?

Question

I know this has been asked in different ways a few times, but nothing has helped me for my specific case.

This is all done on a Windows 7 Home Premium desktop computer through Windows Command Line. I was attempting to create a simple batch program using schtasks to open a bunch of programs automatically upon my logon. However, when I attempt to create the task it says that the access is denied for my batch file.

    schtasks /create /tn Startup /tr "C:\ComputerStartup.bat" /sc onlogin
    ERROR: Access is denied.

So I tried to give my authentication (I am running this as an administrator user).

    schtasks /create /s Jackson-HP /u Jackson /sc onlogon /tn Startup /tr C:\ComputerStartup.bat

It prompted for a password for my user. I don't have a password for my computer so I just pressed enter, and it said:

    ERROR: User credentials are not allowed on the local machine.

I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm still new to creating batch files, so I may be making a newbie mistake. I appreciate any help you can give, thanks.

Answer 1

Try using an elevated (admin) command prompt and use the /ru command-line switch instead of the /u one. Use /rp if you want to specify the password as well.

Answer 2

I had this issue and solved it by recreating the scheduled task (via export and import). It seems that if the user running it is not the "author" of the task then it will throw the access denied error

Answer 3

This is an old question, so you've probably figured it out or moved on, but my understanding is that schtasks won't work with an account that has no password.

Answer 4

I know it is an old issue here, but no solutions out there, and I found out that it strictly is a bug in schtasks.exe

I found a weird workaround/trick, using the Hosts. file(!) though.

See https://eskerahn.dk/wordpress/?p=2724

I only tried it with /Query, but would be surprised if it did not handle the other ones as well

Some * * CENSORED * * somewhere seems to have had the (wrong) idea they you would never need to access your local machine with higher credentials than what you are logged in with interactively....