Services Set to Interact With Desktop May Fail to Start

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This article was previously published under Q157913

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SYMPTOMS

There are several services that are configured to start with the interactive desktop. If a user logs on immediately after Windows NT starts and then immediately logs off, a service configured to interact with the desktop may fail to start. A message may appear that states:

The application failed to initialize because the window station is shutting down.

After you log on a second time, Service Control Manager (SCM) logs two events in the system event log:

ID 7009 Timeout (120000 milliseconds) waiting for service to connect.
ID 7000: The <service name> service failed to start due to the following error:

The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

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CAUSE

After SCM calls CreateProcess to start the service process, it expects the service to connect to a named pipe provided by SCM. A service does this by calling StartServiceCtrlDispatcher early after startup.

When a user logs off, the Win32 subsystem marks the window station as Pending Shutdown. If Kernel32.dll finds this flag, it does not load. The service process never gets to the point where it can register with SCM. SCM does not check for this situation and, therefore, logs the events mentioned above. SCM does not try to start the service again.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows NT 4.0 or Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

152734 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/152734/EN-US/ ) How to Obtain the Latest Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack

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STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Windows NT 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition. This problem was first corrected in Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition Service Pack 4.

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MORE INFORMATION

You can work around this problem by not logging off immediately after logging on.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

327618 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327618/EN-US/ ) INFO: Security, Services and the Interactive Desktop

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