>Armin, another thing I did with the C++ side was add a routine that will impersonate a User when starting the service. This way that service will have access to network resources like SQl Server. The user types this info into a VFP frontend that just writes to the registry. The C++ reads that info from the registry when it starts the service. To the end user, this is all very smooth and no manual config of the service or registry is necessary...

Sounds good! If I understand that right, the service is running on a server under the Local System account and inside the service you're changing the security context to a special user your users can configure the service from any workstation without having acces rights to remotely configure the service via the MMC?

Armin