After several years of a single installation, I was having some issues with my Windows 7 desktop computer at home. I decided to offload all of my important files and perform a fresh reinstallation. After getting the base OS loaded, I started the tedious process of reinstalling my applications, starting with an antivirus program. Shortly followed by Synergy, so I can access my Fedora Linux box that is next to my Windows PC. Synergy installed fine, but when the computer said the service was started, I continued to get “Service not available” messages. In trying to stop the services through the task manager, I received a “Access denied” message. I don’t recall having this issue in the past, but it was years ago that I first installed…

After some quick Google-fu, I came across a similar issue and found that the “User Account Control” settings restricts what you can do, even if your ID was set to be an administrator (which mine was). After changing this setting to the minimal setting (basically disabling it), I was again able to start and stop any services on the computer. Way to go Microsoft — nothing like making an administrator bend over backwards to be able to manage the system.