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Unattended PAD flow runs forever without performing actions

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Posted on by nielslevring

Hi all,

I have built several Power Automate Desktop flows to run in unattended mode. The flows are simple, where they extract data for a local application and insert it into an excel sheet. So very simple flows.

These flows run successfully every time in attended mode. Further, these flows run successfully if I restart the PC, log in, and then log out. Then all flows run smoothly in unattended mode.

The problem is that when I arrive at the office in the morning, these flows run endlessly without reporting an error, but at the same time they don't do anything either. The PC is logged off, so that's not the problem. These flows only run when I restart the pc, log in and then log out again. Then the flow can run without any problems.

Has anyone experienced something similar? And anyone have a suggestion for a solution to the problem?

Thanks a lot in advance.

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Power Automate Desktop

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eetuRobo 4,579 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Does it produce any logs in the cloud after you have cancelled the PAD flow runs?

I would recommend adding take screenshot in the very beginning so you might see if there is something that blocks the PADs work. Also if there are actions that have option to "Fail with timeout error" then add that.
Sometimes I have had issues when trying to open Excel. It just never opens and never timesout.

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Riku 37 on at

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Unfortunately yes, happened today with the newest version. I logged to the VM and Power Automate displayed an 'Unhandled error' dialog and eventually failed in Action 0 (Nothing was performed) and run time was 12 hours.

It did not produce any logs into cloud. So it's a bad situation :D. I hope that booting the VM fixes the issue.

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eetuRobo 4,579 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Does it only run first time after reboot successfully and then always get stuck?
I assume your VMs specs are good enough for PAD.

Next time the flow gets stuck like that log in to the virtual machine and check Task managers Performance window

At some point I had similar issues and even though my VMs specs met the requirements when I checked the performance tab the CPU was running near 100% all the time. I think the reason for that was that the VM was used for multiple flows and one flow for example logged into the VM every 15minutes and opened an ERP.

Everything got fixed when we added Task Scheduler to reboot the machine every night. The repeated flows maybe stacked up some processes that never fully closed or something and that's why it got very slow after few days without reboot.

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