>>Knocking on wood (genuine wood clogs #45, which should be size 11 or 12 in the US), so far so good.
>>
>>Of course, this doesn't answer the initial question: why does Word automation work when I run it manually, but didn't when run from Task Scheduler? Ah... M$.
>
>Believe me I wish I had the answers :o) All I know is that if you do Word Automation via COM, you have to have the path. It may not work reliably (if at all) as a service:
>
>IAll current versions of Microsoft Office were designed, tested, and configured to run as end-user products on a client workstation. They assume an interactive desktop and user profile. They do not provide the level of reentrancy or security that is necessary to meet the needs of server-side components that are designed to run unattended.
>
>From the voice here:
>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757

Great... Now I'll seriously start looking into anything that can open a doc(x) file and convert it to PDF. OOo is a great candidate, though its DOM is completely different and even the ways to instantiate it aren't that easy... but at least under the hood it's not such a mess.

>I tried office automation myself and ran into that issue, but it works for me (so far). However, it is not supported, no guarantees, may stop working for no apparent reason,(which is probably actually a MSFT issue of not always using the user profile that it is running under when it is a service and the user is not physically logged in manualy)... (add the rest of the MSFT speak here)

When I ran the initial conversion of thousands of old doc files, I noticed that Word would eat about 200K per file, and files were mostly below 50K each. Then I'd kill Word when it reached about 200M of eaten-but-not-puked-out memory, my exe would instantiate it again (_access method), and then it'd go its merry way for a few more rounds, until I had to kill my exe as well, because Word wouldn't do anything anymore. Why? Well, opening it manually took some minutes, and then it would show me the list of documents I can save. Huh? Save after doing what? I just opened them, exported as pdf (so they're saved, anyway), closed. Then it would take a few minutes to clear that list. It took me hours to go through all of them.

>BTW, I think we are working around intended MSFT behavior or actually forcing unintended behavior to occur - especially since MSFT is no com these days and all about security (talk about a turn around from the days of easy to configure servers and networks that took the business away from the security intensive Novell systems)...

I don't see this as much of a turn around. M$ was always about more clicks and more roadblocks to automation.