>>I've been told that the OS needs to get a response back from a service to know that the service is ready. How is that done? I have what I believe is a valid service setup, but get the message below when I try to start it using SC. This EXE runs fine, but will not start as a service. I have been researching (and researching) but cannot find anything specific to Foxpro in how to make this work. The service is a Foxpro EXE that is supposed to just sit and listen to a port, then process some stuff when data arrives. Until then it just sits. And listens. But, instead of doing that, after 30 seconds the OS sends this message. There is nothing that this EXE is doing that takes more than a couple seconds to do. Whassup with all this? This is stopping me from continuing/finishing this project. Any help is appreciated.
>>
>>

>>The service did not respond to the start of cotrol requiest in a timely fashion.
>>

>
>
>Just a suggestion - instead of using SC, try using SrvAny:
>
>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890
>
>You might have better luck.

Ok, I had to have exactly this, in this order, in the batch file for it to work:

SC delete "EMPS"
"C:\FMSRun\INSTSRV.EXE" EMPS "C:\FMSRun\SRVANY.EXE"
REGEDIT.EXE /S EMPS.REG
NET START EMPS

I had to use SC to delete the service if it existed (it thought it was already running unless I rebooted), then using instrv and srvany to create it, then I could add my registry entries (parameters, etc.) and then using NET to start it. Haven't got these changes in my EXE that does the controlling of the service, but I'm finally somewhat hopeful...

I can't wait until this is done so I can document it so others don't have to go through all that I did to figure it out.