MSMQ will not start

[Jeff J]

A colleague just rebuilt his machine a couple of weeks ago and tried to use
message queuing for the first time (since the rebuild) today. When he got an
error trying to send a message, I told him to make sure the service was
started. It was not, and it won't start. He gets the mostly useless "The
Message Queuing service on Local Computer started and then stopped. Some
services stop automatically if they have no work to do, for example, the
Performance Logs and Alerts service." message from the SCM.

NO errors are written to the event log. The only event log messages are two
informational ones, the first stating that the service has been sent a start
control and the second stating that the service has stopped. Where do we go
from here?

[John Breakwell (MSFT)]

Hi Jeff,

What did the rebuild entail? A fresh install on a formatted hard disk, for
example? It's very rare indeed for a clean install to fail MSMQ startup.
Does uninstalling and reinstalling MSMQ have the same problem?

If there is nothing useful written to the application or system event logs
then you will need to rely on the MSMQLOG.BIN file.
This binary file needs to be analysed by a Microsoft support engineer to
determine why MSMQ is not starting up.

More information about MSMQ logging is here:

MSMQ FAQ (Chapter 15)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/C/9/FC9989A2-DA75-4D96-B654-4BD29CF6AEE1/MSMQ_faq_updated.doc

MSMQ logging can be controlled with MQTrace.CMD:

Latest version (1.5) of the logging script for MSMQ 3.0
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnbreakwell/archive/2008/07/09/latest-version-1-5-of-the-logging-script-for-msmq-3-0.aspx

Cheers
John Breakwell (MSFT)

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