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.

Vista and the mysterious unidentified network

We’ve been having problems with this since Vista came out, luckily it’s not a terribly frequent occurrence.  A new year has started and we’re seeing it again.  We currently have 2 students who cannot connect to our network, they keep getting the unidentified network with a 169.254 IP.  We have tried everything we can think of:

1. release/renew just times out
2. disable/re-enable the nic
3. checked all the TCP/IP settings & checked the LAN settings
4. typed netsh interface ipv6 show neighbors into the cmd prompt to see if anybody on campus was broadcasting as a gateway
5. I’ve even gone into the registry to disable the broadcast flag.  NOTHING HAS WORKED.
6. Setting the network type to private instead of public if it’s even set wrong.

I’ve spent hours and hours researching this online but so far have only come up with a couple more things to try.  One of which is doing a TCP/IP stack repair and the other just deals with disabling firewalls (windows and otherwise).  Has anybody actually found a solution that works?  This is driving me insane.

Edit #1: It appears that Norton and possibly McAfee cause some sort of problem.  I’m not exactly sure what yet.  We’ve tried disabling both programs, but that didn’t work.  A student uninstalled Norton and was able to get online.  I like those programs less and less the more I work with them.

Edit #2: We came across another one of these and they had some weird panda anti-virus software, uninstalling it got them online.  So if you come across this problem try uninstalling the anti-virus/firewall and see if that fixes it – just disabling them hasn’t worked.  I really wish I knew what specifically about those programs caused the problems.

Trimming Vista’s Fat

I decided to do some research on what all the processes that run and do some trimming of those as well as some of the graphic features to see how many I could get away with disabling without screwing anything up.  With my 2 gigs of ram I haven’t had any problems with it being slow, but it doesn’t hurt to save some memory usage.  I came across an article on howtogeek.com about trimming Vista’s windows borders; a simple task which I never even thought of looking into.  While I was messing with those options I found that I can change the spacing between the icons, which was irritating me a little since they seemed too far apart.  I have aero enabled so my options may be a little different.

Right-click on the desktop -> properties -> window color and appearance -> open classic appearance properties -> advanced and change these options: active title bar 19 to 17, border padding 4 to 0, caption buttons 17 to 15, icon spacing (vertical) 43 to 30, menu 19 to 17,  scrollbar 17 to 15.

There isn’t a huge difference but it makes my desktop look a little cleaner, which I like.

Before:

After:

After tweaking with the graphic stuff I found a huge list of articles at howtogeek.com describing what some services are and how to change or disable a lot of unnecessary options.  I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but the articles I found helpful so far were:

1. Remove Optional and Probably Unnecessary Windows Vista Components
2. What is ctfmon.exe And Why Is It Running? – You only need that if you use the language bar, speech or pen tablet features.
3. What is jusched.exe And Why Is It Running? – Shows you how to take it off the startup list and add a monthly task so that you don’t lose update notifications entirely.
4. What is svchost.exe and why is it running? – Each svchost instance is running a group of services.  I seem to have about 10 of those running, more trimming is needed.  But I found an excellent site to help with that, it’s called blackviper.com, more on that later.
5. Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer – This has to be one of the more irritating features in Vista.  There’s nothing like coming back to your computer to see that it restarted itself while you were working on something.
6. Add “Run as Administrator” to Any File Type in Windows Vista
7. Add “Open with Notepad” to the Context Menu for All Files
8. Clean Up Past Notification Icons in Windows Vista

I haven’t even had a chance to look through all of the articles since there are so many, but those are some helpful ones.  I especially liked the open with notepad one, I use that all the time.

Blackviper.com is a great site for figuring out what services are needed and which you can do without.  You want to mess with the services through services.msc and not taskmgr.exe like so many people do.  It appears to be down at the moment. It has 3 categories for disabling services, “safe”, “tweaked” and one other that I can’t think of.  But it goes from disabling around 15 services, to 50-something, and up to nearly 80.  You have to be careful with this though since you may need services that are listed as disabled on his list.  You’ll probably end up with a hybrid of his 3 lists to fit your needs.  I suggest creating a restore point before each set of changes in case something goes wrong, but I didn’t have any issues.

Quick tip: If you don’t plan on removing SP1 you can clean all the old files that are no longer used by opening your command prompt and typing in vsp1cln.exe.  After this you will not be able to remove SP1.  The article says you will have “a ton” of extra space, but I only noticed a gig more so I guess unless you’re short on space this isn’t very important.
— www.labnol.org

Do all this at your own risk.  I am not responsible for any problems that arise from messing with the system services.