In case this happens again... I recently had the error relating to a NULL result for something that should just simply work - e.g. "dir C:\".At the time this happened, I logged onto the server and was able to see a large number of CMD.exe processes. There were 86 in total! Each one was running under the SQL Server SAC and in theory could be terminated as they look to have been orphaned. I initially tried to terminate them via taskmanager (logged on locally to the server), however "End Process Tree" caused the server to hang for a considerable amount of time - approx. 30 seconds!I used the windows utility - TASKKILL and was able to terminate all CMD.exe calls and without any service detriment (no server / service restart)...taskkill /S serverNAMEorIP /FI "IMAGENAME eq CMD.EXE"TASKKILL - Further information[/url]Happy Days! HTH 🙂

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