The more the merrier Rodney :)

I've just now gone ahead with Alex' suggestion and have installed 4.90 on the same box. I did set up a fresh 4.8x in the past for the same purpose and I'm positive it also hung on restart after changing to timer method. However, this time 4.90 started up fine after the switch.

So then I tried settting all config settings in my main portal to match the fresh instance. I was using settings pretty much identical to Rodney's further up. Then I also went into web.config and commented out three third party httphandlers just in case they had anything to do with it.

The portal got hung up on restart the same as it always has.

What I'd really like to know is what "Timer Method" actually does so differently from "Request Method" so that I might be able to take a guess at what sort of module might be affecting this.

Any advice is appreciated.

Rob

What are the options for this value in the db?  I switched this to '0' from '1' but cant get the site back.  Help.

Ok.  Good news.  By some miracle I was able to get my site working in timer moder which fixed all scheduler issues.  I think the issue may have been that I had tons of stuff stuck in the Queue so when going into timer mode it would hang.  In order to clear the queues in request mode I had to turn the particular schedule item on and off until it stopped sending emails (about 12 emails came out of the queue after 4 restarts of the schedule item).  Once the queue was clear the site accepted timer mode and went off like a rocket.  Now my usersonline works perfect and the emails go every time within a minute.