title: Why might COM automation of Word from within a console application run as a scheduled task work on my development machine but hang on another?
body: <p>I have a console application that uses COM automation to manipulate .DOC and .DOCX files in Word 2010. This works in a scheduled task for a not logged in user account on two development machine (running 32 bit Windows Server 2003) but not on another machine (running 64 bit Windows Server 2003). It does run on that machine if run from the command line by the same user account when logged in (so I don’t think it’s a 32/64 bit issue).</p>
  
  <p>The code hangs at the point it tried to open a document not when the Word application is created.</p>
  
  <p>I have logged in as the user account and opened the file manually (so I don’t think it is popping up any dialog boxes).</p>
  
  <p>I thought that it might be something to do with autocorrect and while looking at the proofing options noticed that the “automatically use corrections from the spelling checker” checkbox is greyed out.</p>
  
  <p>I have used process monitor and could not find any file access failures for files which are on the dev machine but not on the other (Word seems to look for Normal.dot in a number of places but this file in not on the dev machine either).</p>
  
  <p>I am aware that Word automation on a server is not recommended or supported by Microsoft and may be outside the terms of the license.</p>
  
  <p>I am using automation as I need to manipulate files for older versions of Word.</p>
  
  <p>This may be related to my other issue with automation from non logged in accounts: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9701532/why-might-com-automation-from-within-a-console-application-work-on-my-developmen">Why might COM automation from within a console application work on my development machine but not on another?</a> However this case is different in that opening a file is hanging rather than creation of the application program failing.</p>
  
  <p>What else should I try?</p>