Trouble with AT-based Scheduled Tasks after installing KB-4503292 (Monthly Rollup June 2019) for Windows 7

[Guest Maximilian Hausmann]

Hello there everyone,

 

I encountered a serious issue after installing the latest Monthly Rollup from June 2019 on our Windows 7 clients.

Apparently, we can no longer add nor edit already existing scheduled tasks that have been created with AT commands. However, the already existing scheduled tasks appear to execute with no problem, so the functionality is still given.

I double- and even triple checked it through uninstalling the coresponding KB article. Thereafter, I still wasn't able to add new AT Scheduled Tasks through GUI, but it worked through our scripts and regular cmd-use without any problems. Plus, the pre-existing AT-jobs continued to work on, regardless of the KB-Article KB-4503292 being installed or uninstalled on the systems. When trying to add a new AT-job into scheduled task, the Scheduled Task Manager GUI sends a message of an unexpected knot. The job does not appear in the GUI, either. It's merely represented with the Error message. Deleting it through CMD is still possible, which clears the Scheduled Task Manager off of the Error Message.

 

Since I wasn't able to find anything conclusive online regarding this issue, I am seriously hoping someone here has any idea about this occurance. I am well aware AT is rather old and got sort of replaced through other means and commands (such as schtasks). Since AT wasn't even an option anymore to select from the GUI for quite some time now, I can only assume at this point this is some kind of action Microsoft did on purpose. If that's the case, does anyone of you know whether Microsoft said any word about the removal of this feature?

 

For the ones pointing out we could simply rewrite the scripts: Our issue is the company we are working for is using AT-Scheduled Tasks in all of their scripts and programs so far, so we/they had to change every single script. It's an effort we would only want to go through if there really is no other option available.

 

Did someone else run into this kind of trouble, too?

Can anyone help confirm my theory?

 

Best regards and many thanks in advance,

Maximilian Hausmann

 

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