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I have a service in Windows XP that is stopping intermittently. It is transferring data from a PLC to a database.

The vendor who provided the service is directing me to my IT department. The IT department says to check with the vendor who supplied the crappy service.

The service is configured to start automatically. And under the recovery tab the first, second and subsequent failures to restart automatically.

Does anyone have a idea on how to make this service run all the time without stopping?

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What's the service? – random♦ Oct 2 '09 at 2:27
Check your Event Viewer and try to determine from the Application, and possibly System, event logs therein the cause. If you can't edit your post to include the service name, vendor and any relevant errors under the event Viewer – A Dwarf Oct 2 '09 at 2:58
If a service is crashing...mostly it may require expert knowledge of what the service needs & what is the issue inside the service codewise. So I say pursue the Vendor. – Ganesh R. Oct 2 '09 at 4:05
If you can find any errors in the Event Viewer's "Application" log that shows that the service is stopping (most likely because of an unhandled exception) then you can go back to the vendor and they won't be able to send you back to your IT department. (Honestly, they should be more willing to look into the problem rather than just brush you off.) – JMD Oct 2 '09 at 5:03
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5 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I need to stop skim-reading... I just started a VM and took screenshots of the service recovery options and wrote a guide - then I saw you said you already tried this!

Other people have mentioned the event viewer - the fact is, for this feature to work, they would have to program this in themselves otherwise you may only see " has entered a stop state" or nothing at all.

We could really do with a lot more information to help you properly, however, I would suggest that you try to communicate directly with the manufacturer, but first try to install on different machines (if available) to see if the problem is reproduced so you can know for sure if they problem is with the software itself or the way it was made.

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definitely try to reproduce on another machine if possible – jacobsee Jan 30 '10 at 5:35
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Do you have a support contract for the software? If you do then it's the vendor's problem and I'd refer them to the support contract. If not, you may be out of luck if your IT Department doesn't support 3rd party applications like that.

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The only simple automatic solution I can think of is to add a little .bat script to Programs/Startup that will sleep and periodically issue a "net start service" command. Example, with 60 seconds wait:

@Echo Off
:again
sleep 60
net start myservicename
goto again

Left is to make the batch file run invisibly, so have a look at:

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up vote 0 down vote

I think you're trying to solve the wrong problem. If the service is occasionally stopping and not restarting, then you need to know why, as the reasons may be serious. It's almost certainly one for the vendor to resolve, but as your IT department probably won't charge and the vendor might, best exhaust the possibilities with them first.

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You could install a tool that monitors windows services. Something like Service Hawk would help you keep the services started, or allow you to schedule automatic restarts (possibly during the night) to keep the service running smoothly.

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