Vista – The dependency service or group failed to start

This was an error that has come up on some students’ computers.  The problem was that it isn’t very specific so it’s insanely difficult to troubleshoot.  But since the main problem along with that error was the internet not working that helped me figure out what to try.

Some people reformatted and that worked, some people did a system restore and that worked, others reinstalled SP1 and that worked.  Based on the research I did today I couldn’t find any solution that worked for more than 1 or 2 people.  I decided to use a stack repair to see if that would do anything.   I hadn’t seen that in any of the forums I read but it was worth a shot since nothing else worked and I’ve used it in the past to fix connection problems.  If it only worked on one of the computers I wouldn’t think much of it but it worked for both computers so here’s what you do:

1. Go the start menu and type cmd in the search bar.  Right-click on it and choose “run as administrator“.
2. Now type "netsh winsock reset" without the quotes and hit enter.
3. Next type, “netsh int ip reset" once again without the quotes and hit enter.
4. Ignore it if it says that one of the repairs couldn’t be done and now restart the computer.

What this does is reset some configuration files and registry keys to their original state that are related to your computer knowing how to get online.  Various things can corrupt them including viruses/spyware, installing some networking software, and I’ve read some programs that try to remove spyware/viruses can even corrupt them.

I’m not sure what the message saying a repair couldn’t be done was about because they were both able to get online afterward.  I hope this helps some people because the forum posts I saw were pretty hopeless. One pattern I did notice was that a lot of people reporting this issue said that some windows updates had been recently installed.

I think something to look out for which may help you decide whether this will help is opening services.msc (type it in the search bar) and looking at the services that are supposed to automatically start.  On one of the computers I noticed that the DNS Client and DHCP Client both were not running and gave me an error when I tried to manually start them; IPSec Policy Agent, Base Filtering Engine also were not running.  The funny part about that error was that it was something like “A file that should never fail has failed to start.”  Uhh… thanks?

If you end up trying this or finding something else that works please leave a comment, it would be good know.

 

Didn’t work? See this post for a few more ideas.

 

Edit: I’m happy to see this is working for people.  I know how frustrating something like this can be.

Update: In response to the comment from Matt, it sounds like the problem your computer is having is far more than just some services failing to start or some winsock & TCP/IP configurations being corrupted.  I would be surprised if running those commands broke anything since all they do is reset some configuration files to their original working state.  A virus could have corrupted a bunch of files on the computer including those mentioned in this post, so it was only one symptom of the problem.  Sorry it didn’t work.