Often the errors are due to the environment not being correct (are you running the service afrom the local system account or do you log on as a user?

Very likely, and that is what I want to determine, but don't know how. In response to your question -- I tried both, local system account and as myself. No luck either way. Actually, I pared down my simple script to an even simpler script. I mod-ed it to do nothing when service is running... just go to sleep for 30. Nada. No change whatsoever. It just simply fails to start.