Jenkins windows slave service does not interact with desktop
I had lots of issues running Jenkins in Windows using the service. Instead I now disable the service and run it from CMD.
So open CMD
.
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins
java -Xrs -Xmx256m -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle -jar
jenkins.war --httpPort=9091
Services run since Vista in Session 0 and the first user is now in Session 1. So you can't interact any longer. This is called Session 0 Isolation.
Microsoft explains this here and here. You have to use 2nd Program which uses IPC to communicate to the Service.