PowerShell Script Will Not Work in Task Scheduler

Question

PowerShell Script Will Not Work in Task Scheduler

Dustin Albright 41

I have a PowerShell script that checks for a user's last password set date and if it more than 166 days ago it will send them an email reminding them to change their password. The script works well in PowerShell ISE as long as I run as administrator so it can correctly pull the AD property pwdLastSet.

When I try to automate this task using Task Scheduler, it does not work. It used to work about a year or so ago, but I'm not quite sure what has changed with all the Windows updates between now and then.

I have the task using a domain admin account, the 'Run whether user is logged on or not' option is checked, the 'Run with highest privileges' box is checked, and it is configured for Windows Serve 2016. The trigger is set to daily at 2am. In the Actions tab I have 'Start a program' selected, "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" for the 'Program/script' field, and "-File "C:\PasswordExpirationNotifcation.ps1"" in the 'Add arguments (optional)' field.

Every time I manually run the task it ends with (0x1) as the Last Run Result. I tried moving the script to a share on our file server that has open access to all domain users and received the same result.

Any ideas on what I could do different?

Rich Matheisen 48,116 Reputation points

2025-04-01T18:40:11.7433333+00:00
Have you enabled logging for the Operational log in the Event Viewer?

Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > TaskScheduler

Right-click "Operational" and select "Enable Log".

You should then be recording these events:

Event ID 100: Task Started - This event indicates that the scheduled task has started.

Event ID 200: Action Started - This event shows that a specific action within the task has started.

Event ID 201: Action Completed - This event indicates that an action within the task has completed.

Event ID 102: Task Completed - This event signifies that the scheduled task has completed.

Event ID 101: Task Failed - This event indicates that the task has failed to start or complete successfully.

You might also want to enable all tasks history:

Select Task Scheduler (Local)

In the right pane, click on Enable All Tasks History.

You can then check the events for a task in the "History" tab of the event.

Does your script do any recording of its activity to its own log? It's always a good idea to put your own logging into code used for production. It makes it a lot easier to figure out what might be going sideways when something stops working. You can make the logging conditional and activate it using a parameter only when you're troubleshooting.

You can also add the Start-Transcript and Stop-Transcript cmdlets to your code (maybe in the same conditional way you add your own logging).

Without understanding the "how" of a failure, trying to divine the "why" is just guessing.