<ryan>

Interesting, that's how we'd like to ours to behave.

We use SQL Agent as our job scheduler. Stopping the job step leaves a thread of dtexec running the package and it won't stop until killed by pid. What job scheduler do you use?

</ryan>

As for storing packages in the filesystem: 1) it eases our deployments 2) you can't use relative paths in MSDB. Security needs to be taken care of with folder permissions etc. One disadvantage to this is also that we're not having the packages backed up as part of the msdb backups, but rely on our storage backups in the data center - which we are ok with.