Ran into an interesting little problem this morning with getting a job to run in the Task Scheduler of a Windows Server 2008 server with Service Pack 2 installed.

Every time I tried to run the job I would get the error message “The directory name is invalid. (0x8007010B)”.

In looking at the Actions for this Task the “Start in (optional)” field was filled in with the correct path name:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\BLAH\”

I thought it might be the trailing backslash problem, so I removed it.  Same error message.

Turns out it is the quotes that are causing the problem here as the “Start in (optional)” field just doesn’t support them.  Take out the quotes and your task should run just fine.  You can set this directory with or without the trailing backslash and it will still work.

Here’s what my corrected Action looks like in the Task Scheduler.