I think Allen might be onto something with permissions. For XP boxes shelling out and running net stop spooler runs fine. For the windows 7 boxes I get an access denied message. I have to explicitly run cmd as administrator in the windows 7 machines in order for it to successfully run net stop spooler. I was hoping that WMIService would not be subject to the same permission restrictions (based on impersonation level, and me being domain admin), but perhaps that was wishful thinking. Ill add some ?@error, and get back to you on Monday. I'm pretty sure @error was not 0, but I didn't bother to write down what it was. Silly me.