We've got some Windows services written in .NET. They start fine manually within the services mmc, but despite being set to Automatic, they never start when powering on (or rebooting) the machine.

Update In the event log, instead of seeing "xyz started", alongside all the other services starting, I just see "The xyz service entered the stopped state." and a seperate error that says "A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the slsvc service.".

If I manually start them, then I get a normal in the event log as expected, and all is fine - until the next Windows Update patch which forces a reboot and all the services are off again.

Any ideas? I've tried setting them to Delayed Start with no apparent difference.