Task Scheduler Problem

[Brad]

I have a weird problem going on with the Task Scheduler. We run a
perl script through ActivePerl to perform system monitoring and
reporting. It's been running fine on Windows NT, 2000, 2003 and most
of the time on 2008.
The task is scheduled to run every five minutes. It's also scheduled
to stop any currently running instances if they are still running when
the next scheduled run time comes around. Finally it's scheduled to
NOT attempt to run jobs that were missed.
Like I said .. most of the time this works without incident. But
every now and then, with no discernible pattern or reason, the task
scheduler simply stops for a random period of time. It's not that the
jobs are terminating, it's not a credentials thing with the task
itself ... the logs show that the tasks are not even attempted. But
once the scheduler starts executing jobs again it runs every instance
of the task that it would have run, despite being configured to not do
that. So if the task scheduler paused for an hour it tries to run all
12 of the jobs at the same time once it starts working again.

I've found the hotfix at MS where tasks with histories of over 10,000
items may cause the MMC to hang, but nothing else. Because there is
no pattern that I can see to this problem it's kind of hard to
troubleshoot.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the cause of this? Has anyone seen
something similar?