Hi - I received an alert that a task had a problem. Following through the links

Click on the single instance that is listed there and click "Cancel". Then close that pop-up. Right click again over the red-crossed node and select "Start". This will start a new instance of the activity

eduardo - thanks for a quick response. Will your suggestion retain the variables that were changed - I need to force the task through to a successfull completion? I do not wish to lose all of the previously entered data.

Yes, nothing will be lost.

Do watch out for completion of the process. If this process that had the node in error does not have a "terminate" event, then the process status might stay active even though all other nodes might have completed execution.

Eduardo/Akhilan - thanks for the help; slight problem now - can you explain the difference between an 'end event with a dot in it' and an 'end event without a dot'?
Paience is needed here - I'm very much trying to support a system with absolutely NO Appian training or BPM experience.

For this and similar questions your best friend will be the documentation forum.appian.com/.../ and its search box on the left navigation menu. If you search for "End Event" you will find the following section:

forum.appian.com/.../End_Event

which states that "A process can have multiple End Events. If so, the different branches of a process remain active until each active path reaches one of the multiple End Event nodes. In such cases, a Terminate Process event can be used to stop all branches of a process, even if one or more branches have not yet reached an End Event node."

Which basically means:

1. If the process hits a Terminate Event (end event with the dot in the middle) the process gets completed regardless the number of other simple end events in the process.

2. If there's no terminate event the process will complete until all the simple end events are reached

Eduardo/Akhilan - with your help I got it sorted - thank you very much for your help.