Windows Services don't automatically start after reboot?

Question

We've got some Windows services written in .NET. They start fine manually within the services mmc, but despite being set to Automatic, they never start when powering on (or rebooting) the machine.

Update In the event log, instead of seeing "xyz started", alongside all the other services starting, I just see "The xyz service entered the stopped state." and a seperate error that says "A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the slsvc service.".

If I manually start them, then I get a normal in the event log as expected, and all is fine - until the next Windows Update patch which forces a reboot and all the services are off again.

Any ideas? I've tried setting them to Delayed Start with no apparent difference.

Answer 1

What do you mean when you say "we've got some Windows services"? That suggest to me that they're created internally by someone within your organisation? If so then you're in a better position to debug them than anyone else here - what dependencies do these services have on windows components and are your programmers considered testing for the availability of these services and waiting for them to come online when your services start?

Have you considered setting these services as a dependency of the software licensing service (that's what slsvc is)?

from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/193888

To create a new dependency, select the subkey representing the service you want to delay, click Edit, and then click Add Value. Create a new value name "DependOnService" (without the quotation marks) with a data type of REG_MULTI_SZ, and then click OK. When the Data dialog box appears, type the name or names of the services that you prefer to start before this service with one entry for each line, and then click OK.

The name of the service you would enter in the Data dialog box is the exact name of the service as it appears in the registry under the Services key.

When the computer starts, it uses this entry to verify that the service or services listed in this value are started before attempting to start the dependent service.