PVR script not running reliably

[Jeremy Nicoll - ml get_iplayer]

Philip Colmer <philip at colmer.me.uk> wrote:

> It looks like Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 broke Task Scheduler in that
> if a task is running but the user is not logged in, the profile doesn't
> get loaded, so the path is wrong.

>There is a KB article referencing this
>
>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2968540/en-gb 

Maybe (it's not clear from that KB) tasks will work ok if they are run under
the Administrator id (something that never gets logged in, unlike a normal
user).  But you might still have to specify paths explicitly, or use eg:

  --profiledir "C:\xxx\yyy\zzz\iPlayerCachesEtc"


> but I couldn't get the workaround to work for me.

The KB article suggests that starting a dummy process a minute earlier would
work, but I wonder if there's any reason why one minute should be expected
always to work.  Maybe on a heavily used machine it would sometimes need to
start even earlier.  What's more, though they don't say, I assume the dummy
process would need to start and continue to exist right up to the start of
one's task, or maybe past that point.  Perhaps a better way would be to
start the 'dummy' task, have it wait for 60 secs, and then have it issue the
perl commands as sub-processes. 
 
-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.