Task Scheduler Error “A specified logon session does not exist”

Solution

I found that the above error will only occur if the following Security Policy is enabled and you select the “Run whether user is logged on or not” Security option on the General tab, when creating a new task:

SECPOL.MSC | Security Settings | Local Policies | Security Options

Network access: Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication

To resolve this issue, simply Set this policy to Disabled:

The new version of Task Scheduler (Windows Vista onwards) uses Windows Credential Manager to store the credentials of the account that is specified to perform a task.  If the Network access: Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication policy is enabled and applied, Credential Manager cannot store the credentials locally, thus this error message appears.

NOTE you will not receive this error if the “Run only when user is logged on” Security option on the General tab is selected (we do not store passwords in this scenario).