How do you restart the Task Scheduler service without rebooting the server?
The only way I could stop this service without rebooting the server was to run a command prompt using the service account. Do this I used PsExec from Sysinternals
psexec -i -s cmd
In the new window I was able to issue the service stop command with no problem
sc stop schedule
I guess I could restart the service by finding the process ID on the service and killing it. This causes the service to go to a "Stopped" state. Then I used SC command (probably net start will work too) to start it successfully.
Some points to consider:
Since the service is hosted by "svchost" process, killing the process will bring down many other services (in my case 11 services overall) all in the same time.
This is more of a forceful stop situation, not a graceful stop. So if the services are in the middle of something, they won't probably be happy.
After starting the task scheduler service, I was looking for the rest of the services to start, but I saw that all of those 11 services came back after a few seconds. So you don't need to worry about starting all of the services. (Although it might not be your case, better to be careful with system services)
I still don't know if I've caused any problems in my box, but everything seems to be fine.