My company uses VisualCron for script management. The scripts do remote data acquisition (ranging from every 10 minutes to daily), DB maintenance, and other periodic data processing tasks. VC works flawlessly on Windows XP -- something I cannot say for Microsoft's own task scheduler. In fact, it was unexpected deactivations of the MS task scheduler that led us (in desperation) to try VC. Good thing we did! VC has my strong recommendation.

-- Stan