Restarting the service as standard user

[Milan Mihajlović]

Hey all, I seem to have hit an issue with permissions, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask for help, or would MS forums be better.

The use case is:

1. I install the service using the administrator account on Server 2008 / server 2012. The service is set to be run as network service.

2. I can stop / start the service as I wish, without a problem (continues to act normally after start)

3. Using the mmc, I add security template permissions for user group to start and stop service (as shown here)

4. I log in as the user from the group, and I can stop the service, but afterwards the service cannot be started again, either from this account, or from the administrator account. It has to be uninstalled, and then installed again.

The error I get is 1053 - the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion. 

Checking out the events, I see two errors, one with 1053, one stating "A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Service service to connect.". The problem here is that the error is shown almost instantly, and not after 30s.

Restarting the service as administrator works fine, so I would rule out the issue with the service itself, and rather pinpoint it to the permissions issue.

This would allow developers to tinker with the services, without them having to be Administrators, which would be a good advantage in our scenario.