Error 1053: the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

Question

I have recently inherited a couple of applications that run as windows services, and I am having problems providing a gui (accessible from a context menu in system tray) wit

Answer 1

In my case, I had this trouble due to a genuine error. Before the service constructor is called, one static constructor of member variable was failing:

    private static OracleCommand cmd;

    static SchedTasks()
    {
        try
        {
            cmd = new OracleCommand("select * from change_notification");
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Log(e.Message); 
            // "The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle client"
        }
    }

By adding try-catch block I found the exception was occuring because of wrong oracle version. Installing correct database solved the problem.