PowerShell won't run Excel from a scheduled task

Just ran head-on into what appears to be a bug in the .NET Excel object in PowerShell.



It appears to be a known bug but there is not a lot of info about it.  The bug does not allow Excel to be run from a task in windows task scheduler unless the task author has checked the “user has to be logged on to run” option.

The issue is that Excel tries to do a “CreateFile” operation in “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files”.  The problem is that the Temporary Internet Files folder doesn’t exist in that location.

Until Microsoft fixes this the solution work-around is to create two folders:

  • "C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Desktop" (Create on both 32 bit and 64 bit systems)
  • "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop" (Create only on 64 bit systems)

Once these are created and the scheduled task is re-run, everything should work fine regardless if you are running the task with "Run whether user is logged on or not" is checked.  

Solution originally found here:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/aede572b-4c1f-4729-bc9d-899fed5fad02/run-powershell-script-as-scheduled-task-that-uses-excel-com-object?forum=winserverpowershell

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