Server 2008 VSS Writer “Waiting for completion” workaround

Typically a  Windows Server Backup is scheduled to run nightly but will often fail intermittently and then consistently.  From a command line one can see the status of the Volume Shadow Copy writers by typing vssadmin list writers . A number of the writers will show:

State: [5] Waiting for completion
Last error: No error

Stopping and starting the Volume Shadow Copy service does not change the status.  A reboot of the server does fix the issue but is not a good solution.  The easiest thing to fix the status is to run a “Backup Once” of just the C drive to either a local or remote drive.  Once completed the writers all go back to Stable, No Error.