Recently, it was discovered that a client machine had a Task History entry for Hardware Inventory, AEXMACHINV.exe of 'Task Stopped'? In fact, AEXMACHINV.exe stays active and in place, showing up in the computers task manager until a time-out occurs. Of course, there was no hardware inventory on the server either. What happened?
Well, occasionally the computers operating system services can become corrupted. In this case, the installation of the WMI service on this computer was in a corrupted state. A removal and re-installation of WMI resolved the problem.