Summary

When you make changes to system-wide environment variables, those changes are not available to scheduled programs until you reboot the computer.

For example, your system-wide PATH environment variable was set to "c:\winnt"; you have changed it to "c:\winnt;c:\bin". If a scheduled program is run after the change but before the computer is rebooted, it will still receive the path as "c:\winnt".

In order for the change to be available to scheduled programs, you must reboot the computer. Restarting the Arcana Scheduler service will not resolve the problem.

More Information

The environment for an application is fixed at the time the application is started, and is passed by the process that starts it. When you run a "normal" program it receives its environment from the Explorer shell, running under your login session. The shell recognizes environment changes immediately, so the application gets the current environment (though it will not be able to see changes made since the application was started).

A service is started by the Service Control Manager, and so receives its environment from the SCM. The SCM maintains a static copy of the environment that is set when the system starts, so a service never gets the updated environment even if the service is stopped and restarted.

This Windows NT limitation is briefly discussed in Microsoft Knowledge Base articles Q124621 and Q131229.

Status

This problem was corrected as of version 2.2.1 of the Arcana Scheduler. To download the latest version, see the download page.