Service stuck stopping

I had a service hang on Windows 2003. I tried to stop it from the
Services control panel but it got stuck in the "stopping" state. I
found the hung process associated with the service via the task manager
and killed it. However, I cannot start the process (from Services)
because it remains in "stopping" state with all buttons greyed out even
though the process is gone. I'm sure a reboot would resolve this, but
it's a production machine with lots of customers on it (one customer is
down) and can not have down time. How can I make the Services control
panel recognize the process is gone and allow me to restart it for the
down customer? Thanks.

Type SC in Help and support.

SC.EXE
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d.../en-us/sc.mspx

--
Hope this helps. Let us know.

Wes
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User

In news:1132156945.472836.304560@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com,
mark <mpietras@gmail.com> hunted and pecked:
> I had a service hang on Windows 2003. I tried to stop it from the
> Services control panel but it got stuck in the "stopping" state. I
> found the hung process associated with the service via the task manager
> and killed it. However, I cannot start the process (from Services)
> because it remains in "stopping" state with all buttons greyed out even
> though the process is gone. I'm sure a reboot would resolve this, but
> it's a production machine with lots of customers on it (one customer is
> down) and can not have down time. How can I make the Services control
> panel recognize the process is gone and allow me to restart it for the
> down customer? Thanks.

It seems that service control (SC) is a command-line equivalent
(perhaps a slight superset) to what the Service GUI provides...
unfortunately no command for "reset what you think you know about this
service". Turns out though it was right. Unbeknownst to me, that
there was some sort of zombie child process associated with the killed
process that was what the Service control manager was waiting for. In
the end, a utility called "procexp.exe" was able to help associate
service names with executable file paths and process ids to kill
associated processes that the default taskmanager couldn't help with...