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Is there a way to rename a windows service? Not the display name, mind you, the actual name. I can't seem to edit the value in enum\root to be what I want, and there ought to be an easier way, I just can't find it!

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Why do you want to do this? I'd imagine it'd break whatever process relied on that service... – Dentrasi Nov 9 '10 at 21:20
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IIRC the following worked for me (once):

This is nothing I ever would recommend doing

This is what I did

  1. open regedit
  2. navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
  3. Look at the keys in the treestructure inside the left pane and select the service you would like to rename
  4. Rename the key using the Rename entry in the Context-Menu
  5. If there is a subkey named enum delete it. It will get recreated the next time the service starts.
  6. You might want to change the Subkey DisplayName according to the new service name
  7. Reboot the machine for changes to take effect
  8. Pray it did not screw things up
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The permissions on ENUM/Root are quite strict, besides I believe it's a dynamic area controlled by Windows. The place you want to be looking is HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services.

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Yeah, I tried editing that, but the services menu just declared that a registry key was not found :^) – Nate Nov 9 '10 at 20:48
You don't say what your service is doing, but you could capture the existing service's parametes as a .REG file, remove the existing service and create a new one using SC.EXE. Then edit the .REG to rename the "key" entries ([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\<name>\...], plus remove any system generated stuff (password hash, etc). Re-import and reboot. Alternatively, manually add the display name, dependencies, Etc. Of course, I'd test on a VM first ;-) – Simon Catlin Nov 9 '10 at 20:59
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