Currently one of the systems I'm going to be responsible for does it's daily batch jobs by having a computer with XP installed use the built in schedule tool. These scheduled tasks runs IE to access web pages written in ColdFusion, the ColdFusion code does the daily tasks on the live web server.
To avoid time outs, the tasks are broken down into a dozen virtually identical pages that each process a chunk of the data at once. The chunk sizes are hardwired, so as the files to process increase in size, more pages have to be added every so often. And if the file size where to increase unexpectedly, part of the data would be left unprocessed without notice. Nor is there any notice if the batch jobs really worked or not.
And as would be expected in the situation, the pages are unsecured, anybody that can guess the page names could run the jobs whenever they wanted, totally horking the system.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to rewrite the entire thing before I have to roll this out to more users and companies. But I'm guessing I'll be rewriting the whole thing in little peices as I go.
Jay