Error 1053: the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

Question

I have recently inherited a couple of applications that run as windows services, and I am having problems providing a gui (accessible from a context menu in system tray) wit

Answer 1

I had this problem too. I made it to work by changing Log On account to Local System Account. In my project I had it setup to run as Local Service account. So when I installed it, by default it was using Local Service. I'm using .net 2.0 and VS 2005. So installing .net 1.1 SP1 wouldn't have helped.

Answer 2

This worked for me. Basically make sure the Log on user is set to the right one. However it depends how the account infrastructure is set. In my example it's using AD account user credentials.

In start up menu search box search for 'Services' -In Services find the required service -right click on and select the Log On tab -Select 'This account' and enter the required content/credentials -Ok it and start the service as usual

Answer 3

We have Log4Net configured to log to a database table. The table had grown so large that the service was timing out trying to log messages.

Answer 4

I had this problem, it took about a day to fix. For me the problem was that my code skipped the "main content" and effectively ran a couple of lines then finished. And this caused the error for me. It is a C# console application which installs a Windows Service, as soon as it tried to run it with the ServiceController (sc.Run() ) then it would give this error for me.

After I fixed the code to go to the main content, it would run the intended code:

ServiceBase.Run(new ServiceHost());

Then it stopped showing up.

As lots of people have already said, the error could be anything, and the solutions people provide may or may not solve it. If they don't solve it (like the Release instead of Debug, adding generatePublisherEvidence=false into your config, etc), then chances are that the problem is with your own code.

Try and get your code to run without using sc.Run() (i.e. make the code run that sc.Run() would have executed).

Answer 5

In case you have a windows form used for testing, ensure that the startup object is still the service and not the windows form

Answer 6

I was running into a similar problem with a Service I was writing. It worked fine then one day I started getting the timeout on Start errors. It happened in one &/or both Release and Debug depending on what was going on. I had instantiated an EventLogger from System.Diagnostics, but whatever error I was seeing must have been happening before the Logger was able to write...

If you are not aware of where to look up the EventLogs, in VS you can go to your machine under the Server Explorer. I started poking around in some of the other EventLogs besides those for my Service. Under Application - .NETRuntime I found the Error logs pertinent to the error on startup. Basically, there were some exceptions in my service's constructor (one turned out to be an exception in the EventLog instance setup - which explained why I could not see any logs in my Service EventLog). On a previous build apparently there had been other errors (which had caused me to make the changes leading to the error in the EventLog set up).

Long story short - the reason for the timeout may be due to various exceptions/errors, but using the Runtime EventLogs may just help you figure out what is going on (especially in the instances where one build works but another doesn't).

Hope this helps!