i know this is very much a "how long is a piece of string" type of question, however 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) with both of them.

before you ask, the reason why we need a gui for a windows service is in order to be able to re-configure the behaviour of the windows service(s) without resorting to stopping/re-starting.

my code works fine in debug mode, and i get the context menu come up, and everything behaves correctly etc.

when i install the service via "installutil" using a named account (i.e., not Local System Account), the service runs fine, but doesn't display the icon in the system tray (i know this is normal behaviour because i don't have the "interact with desktop" option).

here is the problem though - when i choose the "LocalSystemAccount" option, and check the "interact with desktop" option, the service takes AGES to start up for no obvious reason, and i just keep getting "Could not start the ... service on Local Computer. Error 1053: the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion".

incidentally, i increased the windows service timeout from the default 30 seconds to 2 minutes via a registry hack (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824344, search for TimeoutPeriod in section 3), however the service start up still times out.

my first question is - why might the "Local System Account" login takes SOOOOO MUCH LONGER than when the service logs in with the non-LocalSystemAccount, causing the windows service time-out? what's could the difference be between these two to cause such different behaviour at start up?

secondly - taking a step back, all i'm trying to achieve, is simply a windows service that provides a gui for configuration - I'd be quite happy to run using the non-Local System Account (with named user/pwd), if I could get the service to interact with the desktop (that is, have a context menu available from the system tray). is this possible, and if so how?

any pointers to the above questions would be very much appreciated!

thanks in advance for your help.