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

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) with both of them.

The reason why we need a gui for a windows service is in order to be able to re-configure the behaviour of the windows service(s) without resorting to stopping/re-starting.

My code works fine in debug mode, and I get the context menu come up, and everything behaves correctly etc.

When I install the service via "installutil" using a named account (i.e., not Local System Account), the service runs fine, but doesn't display the icon in the system tray (I know this is normal behavior because I don't have the "interact with desktop" option).

Here is the problem though - when I choose the "LocalSystemAccount" option, and check the "interact with desktop" option, the service takes AGES to start up for no obvious reason, and I just keep getting

Could not start the ... service on Local Computer.

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

Incidentally, I increased the windows service timeout from the default 30 seconds to 2 minutes via a registry hack (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824344, search for TimeoutPeriod in section 3), however the service start up still times out.

My first question is - why might the "Local System Account" login takes SOOOOO MUCH LONGER than when the service logs in with the non-LocalSystemAccount, causing the windows service time-out? what's could the difference be between these two to cause such different behavior at start up?

Secondly - taking a step back, all I'm trying to achieve, is simply a windows service that provides a gui for configuration - I'd be quite happy to run using the non-Local System Account (with named user/pwd), if I could get the service to interact with the desktop (that is, have a context menu available from the system tray). Is this possible, and if so how?

Any pointers to the above questions would be appreciated!

After fighting this message for days, a friend told me that you MUST use the Release build. When I InstallUtil the Debug build, it gives this message. The Release build Starts fine.

If you continue down the road of trying to make your service interact with the user's desktop directly, you'll lose: even under the best of circumstances (i.e. "before Vista"), this is extremely tricky.

Windows internally manages several window stations, each with their own desktop. The window station assigned to services running under a given account is completely different from the window station of the logged-on interactive user. Cross-window station access has always been frowned upon, as it's a security risk, but whereas previous Windows versions allowed some exceptions, these have been mostly eliminated in Vista and later operating systems.

The most likely reason your service is hanging on startup, is because it's trying to interact with a nonexistent desktop (or assumes Explorer is running inside the system user session, which also isn't the case), or waiting for input from an invisible desktop.

The only reliable fix for these issues is to eliminate all UI code from your service, and move it to a separate executable that runs inside the interactive user session (the executable can be started using the global Startup group, for example).

Communication between your UI code and your service can be implemented using any RPC mechanism: Named Pipes work particularly well for this purpose. If your communications needs are minimal, using application-defined Service Control Manager commands might also do the trick.

It will take some effort to achieve this separation between UI and service code: however, it's the only way to make things work reliably, and will serve you well in the future.

ADDENDUM, April 2010: Since this question remains pretty popular, here's a way to fix another common scenario that causes "service did not respond..." errors, involving .NET services that don't attempt any funny stuff like interacting with the desktop, but do use Authenticode signed assemblies: disable the verification of the Authenticode signature at load time in order to create Publisher evidence, by adding the following elements to your .exe.config file:

<configuration>
    <runtime>
        <generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>
    </runtime>
</configuration>

Publisher evidence is a little-used Code Access Security (CAS) feature: only in the unlikely event that your service actually relies on the PublisherMembershipCondition will disabling it cause issues. In all other cases, it will make the permanent or intermittent startup failures go away, by no longer requiring the runtime to do expensive certificate checks (including revocation list lookups).

I faced this problem because of a missing framework on the box running my service. The box had .NET 4.0 and the service was written on top of .NET 4.5.

I installed the following download on the box, restarted, and the service started up fine: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653