Is this possible in Windows 7?. I remember years ago there was a program svrany I think it was for xp, but it was flaky. Have things gotten any better under Windows 7. There is a program I need to load as windows is loading, I tried to load it in the startup of all users but users are complaining it slows done the boot time of the computer. So i'd like to make it a service if possible.

Thanks for any advice anyone can offer.

Yes, it's possible, but if it slows down boot as a program moving it to a service isn't going to make it any better, either. You might find your time better spent using the WPT to get a boot trace and analyze why it is slow before figuring the best way to alleviate user experience.

How about run registry? I would suggest you to write autoit script to delay its loading.

Also remember that if you run it under the System account, it can't interact with the user.

Basically it is projector software that turns on the projector for our Podium Machines. I put it in the startup of all users, but as we all know before stuff runs in startup, the full windows desktop must load fully first. Hence my Idea of putting it has a service, so the projector software will load as windows loads. Cluberti, I took your advice and ran WPT and followed the instructions on MSFN there is a noticeable on boot up time.

I'd still like to try to load my projector software as a service.

Also remember that if you run it under the System account, it can't interact with the user.

If you have the .ETL file available, perhaps you could compress it with 7zip or WinRAR and upload it somewhere so we can take a look. However, if the program is just slow, there's not much you can do. Trip is also correct that running it as a service in Vista/2008+ means it runs as system in session 0, so there's no way to interact with it. If the program needs to be controlled in any way, you won't be able to do it. Also, services behave a little differently in Vista/2008+, hence why srvany is no longer supported.

OK, but with all due respect, all repliers are sidestepping part of the OP's initial question, and this got me curious, too.

So, then... is there any (preferably MS, but not necessarily MS) solution to run a program as a service in Vista+, just as one can do it using srvany in XP?

Yes, sc.exe can configure new services. However, it's not *entirely* the same as using srvany, and if the program doesn't run well inside sc, you'd have to use something 3rd party (nothing from MS here, as doing this is technically unsupported). Srvany was an NT4 reskit tool, and wasn't officially supported even then (reskit tools have/had no support).

Also you can change the account used by a service and make it run with a user account.

MS srvany.exe was also available in windows 2003 resource kit.

The free good alternative i found is ABC_srvany.