Malcolm,

>I'm wondering if there's a permission issue? Did this start to happen after a recent service pack?

Yes this is all after all the patches that came out a couple of weeks ago, this box went through a major update on 8/29.

>Also, could there be a pathing issue - I'm wondering (total SWAG) if new DLL's are showing up in your app's path that override what your application used to use? Is there anyway you can get a before/after list of files and/or registry settings from your server to see what's recently changed?

It's not just my exe that's misbehaving it's even things as simple as notepad.exe and calc.exe. I found this article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837900 which sounds sort of related but it's not an issue with just taskman that the hotfix is about.