I have a critical windows service that I need for my web application. 

Unfortunately, the windows service does not start properly, but remains in a status of "Starting" for about 7 minutes and 38 seconds, and then fails. 

My web application works fine when the service is in the "Starting" mode.

I have a windows scheduled task that runs every minute to restart the service if necessary.

```
net start "my service"

```

Therefore there is a gap of about 22 seconds from when the service fails until it starts up again. In additional it takes an additional 30 seconds or so for my application (which is dependent on this service) to start working.

I have intentionally not named the errant service. I did open a separate question <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8470975/oracle-oc4j-service-keeps-stopping> whose aim was to actually solve the problem. 

In this question, I am not trying to solve the problem, but rather find a workaround to try and keep this service in a status of "Starting" the whole time.

What is infuriating, is that until I restarted the server today, my workaround of restarting the service every 3 minutes actually worked, with no application downtime whatsoever.

Does anybody have any suggestions? I did try changing the registry key of ServicesPipeTimeout to 86400000 (24 hours!) in a bid to keep the service in the status of "Starting" for longer.