This may be a windows service "feature". Depending on how the service is set up you may be unable to use network resources (e.g. connecting to a database on a remote server, seeing some network drives).

Check your service setup, if it is using the default account this could be the problem. Reconfigure it to use your login and password and it should work. Except that is unbelievably ugly for distributing applications... Anyway test this with a simple application first.

I have run into a couple of pieces of software that absolutely refuse to run as services. In those cases I set up a server program that is always running listening for requests on a specified port. The perl service connects to the network socket and requests that the server program runs the buggy executable. /msg me if you want some advice - the code is not even gamma quality, it is hideously insecure so it's not reuse ready.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

"The future will be better tomorrow."