Windows Services Stuck in “Starting” Status

If only this could have pertained to Suse Linux that title would have been almost completely alliterated. I can picture it now…”Suse Services Stuck in Starting Status.” Say that one five times fast. But, alas, it is not Suse Linux, it’s the wonderful world of Windows. (See? I still got a little of the alliteration going.)

Enough of that, however. You are likely more interested in how to resolve this issue than seeing how witty I can be. If you have found this post because you are looking for a way to resolve this, my guess is that you have at least one computer that is having this problem right now and you need a solution.


While I have seen a number of sites that offer some possible solutions to this problem, I think I can offer you a scenario that I have been unable to find anywhere else. Before I get to that, let me re-iterate some of the more common solutions and hopefully that will be sufficient to get you up and running again.

Scenario #1: Service uses specific unique executable program

 

In this scenario, you have a program that runs as a service and this program has a specific name that it runs as. For example, I am fairly certain that every PC in the free world is now required to have iTunes installed on it. Along with the iTunes installation, you get a program called iPodService.exe which runs as a Service. If you open your Computer Management screen and look at your Services, you will see the “iPod Service” in that list. The Status is probably “Started” and the Startup Type is most likely “Manual.”

Now, I’m not going to get into detail about what those mean. For now, I just want to make sure you can identify the service we are talking about.

Let’s say, for our example, however, that the Status is not “Started” but instead it is “Starting” and it just stays in that status for a long time. If this happens, you may not be able to sync your iPod or iPad device and will likely begin to get frustrated. That is understandable with such mission-critical apps as this.

While there is a chance that this could be because the iPodService.exe program is corrupted somehow, let’s just assume for our scenario that there was a simple hiccup and it just needs to be stopped and restarted. When you try to stop the service, that option is not available because the status has to be “Started” in order to stop it.

In this case, you can simply kill the program directly in one of two ways. If you live and breath with the mouse, you can kill it with Task Manager:

1. Open Task Manager
2. Change to the Processes tab
3. Locate the iPodService.exe process
4. Right-click on that process
5. Select End Process from the context menu

Voila! The process should end. I say “should” because usually that will work just fine. However, if that does not work and/or you just love using the command prompt because you are an old-school geek (like me), you can run the following from the DOS command prompt:

taskkill  /f  /im  iPodService.exe

This will force the process to close and then you can restart the service. As long as the program is not corrupt, it should start up just fine, though the problem may be that another required service is missing, corrupt, or simply not running. Let’s assume, for the sake of this example, that it starts up just fine at this point.

On to the next scenario…

Scenario #2: Service is running under the svchost.exe as a parameter

 

This one gets a bit trickier, but as you will see…not that much. This main difference is that when you look in Task Manager at the processes, you will see a bunch of processes called svchost.exe. Now, how the heck do you know which one controls which service? It’s probably not a good idea to just guess.

Unfortunately, this fun little helpful hint will not work in Windows XP or earlier. I think it’s in Vista and I know for sure it’s in  Windows 7, though.

If you have this issue and want to make sure you are killing the correct process, you can still use Task Manager. In Task Manager for Windows 7, there is a tab called “Services” which shows you all your services, their status, etc. Once you find the service you need to end (and verify that it is still in a “Starting” status) you can right-click on the service and select “Go to Process” from the context menu.

At this point, I recommend making note of some information. Before you try ending the process as described above in scenario #1 (now that you have found the right one), you will want to be sure to note the process ID (PID). That will be important if trying to end the process through Task Manager doesn’t work.

If that is the case, and it won’t end that way, you will have to resort to the TASKKILL command just like above, but with one slight variation. Since they use the same svchost.exe program, you can’t kill it the same way or you may kill the wrong svchost.exe Fortunately, however, TASKKILL is a bit more flexible than that and you can use not only the name of the program, but you can refer to the PID, instead. (Hence the reason for noting that above.)

In this case, let’s say that PID was 3724. You would type the following at a command prompt:

taskkill  /f  /pid  3724

That should end that process for you. From here, as before, you can now work on troubleshooting why the service failed or continues to fail, etc. But that is a discussion for another time and at another place. For now, my work here is done.

Are there any other scenarios that do not fall into either of these that I have illustrated? Please let me know and I will try to include them.

Happy computing.