AppDomains in Windows Services

I've been meaning to write down something on this for a couple weeks now but have been having a tough time formulating a nice message on this. The short version is be very carefull doing this. I believe that somehow AppDomain's rely on something out of the Windows User Profile, and over time in a Windows Service when you're loading and unloading AppDomain's stuff MAY get screwed up.

We had a scheduler app which basically used AppDomain's as an isolation mechanism for controlling when and how each scheduled component was called and then disposed. Code looked something like this...

for each s as ScheduledComponent in myList
Dim d as new AppDomain
try
dim i as IExecutableInstance = d.CreateInstance("LaunchPad")
i.Execute
finally
AppDomain.Unload(d)
end try
next

Over time we'd eventually get into a state where the entire scheduler service which just cause a windows segmentation fault and shut down. No nice dot net exception or anything. Like I said, our best guess is that something gets out of sync between the windows profile and whatever exists in a dot net AppDomain.

Anyway, our solution was to create a wrapper layer which basically called each scheduled component as a process instead. This seems to be working very reliably ever since.