>The fail silently is probably the biggest caveat.
>I have my tasks send me sms "Happy and Working" messages every day at the same time.
>The same time is important - if it fails, you will get curious as to why you did not get your daily happy message.

That wouldn't help me much, because out of a handful of such things I wrote over the years (for some I guess I forgot - maybe they still work somewhere), the one most frequently used is running every hour, and most of it not in my timezone. And my ringtone for incoming SMS is the intro for Zeppelin's "Good times bad times", because it chimes M in Morse code... and starts me every time. So not practical at all in my case.

>The IT cops job is to stop software from working.
>Keep this in mind.

Well in that case they failed miserably. I have left the Total Commander on a serverin 2007 because I needed to do a lot of file manipulation, and wExploder is just too unwieldy for what I had to do. They had two security audits since then, and they even asked why was Foxit installed etc etc. These two batallions of ITstapo haven't found TC, even though it was neatly registered... in my MRU list for the Run command in the menu. But they weren't looking there, they were looking only for software which got installed, not for random executables which may run without installation. It's still there.

I guess every security breach begins with a neat installer with cute pictures in the dialogs.

>>Why is this password thing important? Because when it expires, it will be changed, but it will NOT be changed in TSch, because your task runs silently and without a problem and everyone forgets about it. Two months later (sometimes four) someone will notice that the task isn't running and once they get your attention your exe better be able to deal with the backlog.
>
>Dragan, backlog is another excellent point.
>I have some scheduled tasks that create files and FTP or SFTP send the files to another company.
>It is dangerous to assume that every file you create can be sent at this moment.
>There may be an interruption in the internet connection, the IT cops at the receiving company can invalidate your FTP credentials, or there may be a meteor shower - ANYTHING may happen, and eventually does happen.
>
>So, yes, your exe better be able to handle the backlog.

One of those tasks is a file converter (doc to pdf) and if it doesn't work for three months, I don't care. When it starts working, it will read the datetime of its last successful conversion and take it from there. It's stored in, believe it or not, a simple ini file. Also good when installing at a new customer - "since which date you want them converted"?

>
>Good points all.
>I detect the tribulations of real-world experience in your comments ;)

Dunno how real it may be. I've seen some pixels moving around my monitors, and I guess they represent some servers somewhere, which I've never seen. Some of them I don't even know the city where they're supposed to be, and in a couple of cases I actually had the country wrong. Surreal as it is, the pixels still describe it as working. Weirld... as in "weird world".