It seems we have reached a limit as to how many Windows Services that can be running at a time. We have about 70 running services, when we try to add another we get the 1053 Error. I've tried the fix that adds the ServicesPipeTimeout registry key but that didn't help. If I stop a service (like Print Spooler), I can start another. Ideas?
ADDENDUM: The Service I'm trying to start is a duplicate of 20+ other services. They all just have a different name. I also have as many as 70 of these services on other servers, and they aren't causing any trouble. BTW, these services are IntraWeb Web servers.
You might be more be hit by a server performance limitation or a bad services that you try to add (badly coded) as the error 1053 just mean the service wasnt able to start under 30 seconds.
Which could be normal on a overloaded server.
Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
You can set a highter value than 30 seconds in worst case;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control, ServicesPipeTimeout:DWORD, and try with a decimal value of like 6000.
I would definitly check to be sure your server is not overloaded to a bottleneck (bad IOPS? bad networking? etc..)
There is no hard (or even configurable) limit on the number of Windows Services that can be running at the same time.
If your service can't start unless you stop something else, either there is a problem in the service itself or in the system as a whole.