>>Thank you. Then the windows scheduler will be the approach (if customer approves, of course).
>>
>>>Been there, done that. I would second on Sergey's advice. Do not try to run a VFP service with a timer continuously. It stops working with no reason. We ended up with using windows scheduler itself (also much more flexible).

Thanks for confirming. I had to rework the whole thing to kill itself (aka quit) after 59 minutes, and scheduled a restart on the hour. It would check on whether there's anything to do every 45 seconds and it would do it for quite a number of hours, until it would mysteriously stop. This hourly restart solved it, without really having a way to investigate the bug. Thanks for confirming that it indeed was a bug (even if it comes after some seven years).