Starting and stopping a service causes Windows 7 to get into a bad state

Question

Hello,

When repeatedly starting and stopping a service used by an application being developed, eventually Windows gets into a state where the following is observed:

- Mozilla Firefox will not start (immediately crashes upon start-up)

- Windows Photo Viewer will not start-up upon trying to open a picture with it or preview a picture

- Internet Explorer starts, but the address bar does not work, the Bing search bar does, navigation works, but right-clicking produces no menu

- Visual studio UI test builder fails to recognize some controls that it did previously (controls embedded in a toolbar), but still recognizes others (winbuttons)

And these are just the issues that I've noticed.

Task manager, resource monitor, event viewer, and sfc /scannow all reveal nothing out of the ordinary. The problem persists regardless of what I do until I restart, which causes the problem to resolve.

Does anyone here have any idea what resource the service continues to hold on to/is being starved in order to cause these symptoms?

Answer 1

Nothing short of properly communicating with the SCM. If you can post some code, that'd be helpful.