Hi alltogether,
I'm using PDFCreator on a Windows Small Business-Server 2003R2 as network Printer. Everything works fine so far, except that I have to logon every time I restart the server to get PDFCreator working. This is quite a problem and so I tried installing PDFCreator as a service.
I first tried using srvany and instsrv as described and it was working in terms of the service (installed correctly in the Reg and was running according to the service-manager). What did not work was the PDFCreator itself. To get printing to work I have to execute PFDCreator.exe (or the Autostart, respectively) to get the printmonitor up and the printing running(which means I have to logon).
I allowed the service to interact with the desktop, tripple checked every path in the Reg and everything else, nothing worked. The service shows as "started" and does start automatically, but the printer just doesn't work and the print-monitor doesn't come up.
Now I tried to use sc.exe which should work also (worked great on my XP Professional machine).
So command is:
sc create "PDFCreator" start= auto binpath= "c:\\Programme\\PDFCreator\\PDFCreator.exe"
You can even add a description by prompting
sc description "PDFCreator" "This service allows offline priniting of PDFs"
Now the service is created and all seems fine, but when I try to start it, the process bar moves until 2/3rds and then there's this error message 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
Have you any suggestions for this issue?
Otherwise I would state that using sc.exe is better than using srvany and instsrv, because sc.exe is present on nearly any Windows Machine since XP so it requires no installation, and there's no need to change something in the Reg.