ExcelBanter - Excel Printing Service

Hello,

I have been searching for a decent way of running an NT service that
invokes an instance of Excel in order to print excel worksheets to PDF
through code.

In my current setup, I use Adobe PDF Writer as the PDF driver and have
a written an NT service to poll a data store for queued documents.
All works reasonably well when run as a standalone application,
however, when I attempt to place this in a service context, the Excel
process hangs and nothing is printed.

I have allocated the service to run under the local_sys account and
have also added printers to the default user per knowledge base
articles on the subject. However, I haven't found this to be
bulletproof.

I understand that office automation in a service is not very well
supported, but I also know that this is a common task. Printing
office artifacts to PDF should be a common request since both are
somewhat ubiquitous. Running an open login session is not really an
option.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Alejandro