The Server service hung on starting.
For a couple of years now, one of my Windows XP workstations has taken about 10 minutes to start responding on the network. The 10 minutes would be spent trying to start the Server service. Then an error 7022 with a message “The Server service hung on starting.” would be entered in the System Event Log, the Server service would be restarted, and everything would be fine. Every now and then I’ve searched Microsoft Support to see if they had any suggestions but never found anything. I’ve also Googled it from time to time, and still no dice. I don’t know what made me decide to try once again, but I did today. While the search on MS still came up empty, Google once again came to the rescue. It was to a forum post which interestingly enough, contained a link to a MS KB article:
And here is a direct link to that article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319127
In brief, some Lexmark and HP printer drivers install port monitoring software which in some undescribed fashion cause the Spooler service to try to start before the Server service. The solution is to make the Spooler service depend on the Server service so Spooler does not start until after Server. For more details go to the MS link, but if you know what you are doing, you can add lanmanserver to the DependOnService key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler.
<rant>One of the most interesting things I find about this is that Google was able to to provide a link, but Microsoft Support search was not able to. The support.microsoft.com robots.txt file disallows search engines from crawling Knowlege Base articles. And the would be okay if their own search worked well, but in this case it totally failed even though the exact phrase clearly exists in the article.</rant>
Tags: Windows
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
OMG, thanks so much. I spent hours trying to figure out what was causing this to hang. I looked at the event viewer, but nothing showed up. I finally timed how long it was taking, then I got the idea to look at the eventlog, found the message about Server hung, googled it, found your blog, and applied the reg fix. The reg key already had the value of RPC Remote Procedure Call, so I added LanmanServer on the line below it, and verified it appeared correctly in services.msc on the dependencies tab. now I’m going to restart and hope it works correctly. thanks again
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
YES, that worked perfectly. Thanks again. I agree that it it pretty lame that search engines can’t crawl the KB articles and the KB search tool is so bad. That is why MS is so far being in the search category. They S U C K !
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Thanks Steve. That is exactly why I started this. I’m glad it helped somebody.