One John

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>