Windows Service not starting on Windows 10 upgrade

Question

I wrote a windows service it it works and STARTS fine in most operating systems. I have narrowed down the fact that Windows 10 upgraded from windows 8 causes a problem where th

Answer 1

We had a similar issue with windows 10 where most .Net based services would fail on startup, but could be started later manually just fine. For some reason, services that are written in .NET take longer to start in Windows 10. By default, if a service takes longer than 30 seconds to start without responding, the service is terminated by Windows.

I was able to change that behavior to 60 seconds in the registry. Go to:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\

If it doesn't already exist, create a DWORD (32-bit) key called "ServicesPipeTimeout"(minus quotes). Set its value to 60000(in decimal). This correlates to 60 seconds in milliseconds.

I even created a regfile to automate this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control] "ServicesPipeTimeout"=dword:0000ea60

Just paste into notepad and save as a .reg file.

This is not a delayed start, but an increase in the time given to services to respond after startup. This fixed the issue for us on multiple machines. Unfortunately, I still do not know why .NET services take so long to start that they get terminated. However, I feel this is a Microsoft bug, and not necessarily anything us users are doing wrong...