Hi All,

I’ve come across this issue on a few installs and wanted to post a workaround I’ve found that works well.

Firstly the issue is caused by changes Microsoft made to certain Exchange 2007 services that supposedly causes the service to check if the certificate that was used to sign their managed code has been revoked. Great idea but I’ve yet to see it working successfully and on applying the update rollup and rebooting a heap of Exchange services will have timed out when starting.

So to fix this do the following…

On the effected Exchange 2007 server… Start à Run à Regedit à select HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control à Right-click on Control and select New à DWORD Value à name it “ServicesPipeTimeout” (without the quotes) and give it a decimal value of “60000″ (again no quotes).

Reboot your server(s) and all should be well. Effectively I think you are telling the service controller to allow a service 60 seconds to start before marking it as timing out. This change likely applies to all your services.

Microsoft suggests two workarounds; the first is to add a line in the hosts files for crl.microsoft.com and reference 127.0.0.1. I’ve tried this option a number of times and have had mixed success with it, on some servers it seems to do the trick on others its doesn’t. The second is detailed here (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944752) but only works if you have the .Net Framework 3.5 installed or apply a hotfix to the 2.0 Framework which is a bit of a hassle to go through.

Hope you find this useful!

N3ilb