Task Scheduler is one of those great little components that once you set it, you tend to forget it. One of the Windows 2003 servers I tend has been running scheduled tasks flawlessly for over a year until they suddenly stopped one day. Every time I went to open/edit and individual task’s properties, a dialog with the following message appeared:

General page initialization failed.
The specific error is:0x80090016: Keyset does not exist
An error has occurred attempting to retrieve task account information. You may continue editing the task object, but will be unable to change task account information.

A solution to this problem is not readily apparent, more so after the ubiquitous net search returns results that relate to Windows 2000, not 2003. After some playing, and with reference to the MS KB article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;246183, I got the Task Scheduler working again doing the following:

1. Stop the Cryptographic service
2. Delete the contents of the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18 folder – as a precaution, I made a backup first.
3. Start the Cryptographic service (a server restart may be required)
4. Re-assign the Run As user account for every required scheduled task