My organisation has a policy of disabling Task Scheduler on all servers and workstations (don't ask, I tried once to wrestle the pig).

I need to collect performance stats using Data Collector Sets in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 but the Performance Monitor interface requires Task Scheduler to be running. Is this possible because I'm not trying to schedule anything (except the collection of WMI information every 15 seconds but I doubt it hands that task off to the task scheduler)? Is there any way to trick it into thinking Task Scheduler is running? If not, is there any way to temporarily override the group policy to allow Task Scheduler to run? I've found that most group policy can be overridden in this way by an Administrator by editing the registry.

On exactly the same vein, I want to defragment a hard disk on one of my workstations, but I can't get it to start because of the dependancy on Task Scheduler - is it possible to overcome this?