Windows service stops automatically

Are you tracing out any debug information? Most likely an exception is being thrown during your initialization. I would trace out all your exceptions and use Debugview to view them.

This particular error message means what it says - that your service has started but then quite soon it exited for some reason. The good news is that your service is actually doing something, so you have the executable configured and running as a service properly.

Once started, for some reason it is quitting. You need to find out why this is. Add some debugging to tell you its up and running and known exit cases. If that doesn't reveal the problem then add some debugging to let you know it's still running and work backwards from when that stops.

I had a similar problem that occurred because my Event Logs were full and the service was unable to write to them. As such, it was impossible to debug by looking for messages in the Event Viewer. I put a try/catch and dumped the exception out to a file. I had to change the settings on my logs to fill as needed instead of every 7 days and this allowed the services to start.

Of course, the root of the problem for me is that I have a nVidia driver issue that is flooding my event logs and now I'm probably beating on the disk, but that's another issue.

Either you are not starting any threads on the OnStart method to do work, or there is an exception raised within your OnStart method.

If an exception is thrown, it will appear in the Windows Event log. The Windows Event log is a good place to start in any case.

Generally an OnStart method looks like this:

Thread _thread;

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
    // Comment in to debug
    // Debugger.Break()

    // Do initial setup and initialization
    Setup();

    // Kick off a thread to do work
    _thread = new Thread(new MyClass().MyMethod)
    _thread.Start();

    // Exit this method to indicate the service has started
}