How to solve “service is marked as an interactive service. However, the system is configured to not allow interactive services. This service may not function properly.”

Jan 14th, 2009
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If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 (as my writing this article) you may find a problem installing any software creates a service and need to interact with your desktop

Installation will silently fail and event viewer will report:

Service is marked as an interactive service.  However, the system is configured to not allow interactive services.  This service may not function properly.

There is a way to solve this. Take a look in your services.msc snap-in and identify the service named Interactive Services Detection. Now stop and disable it.

You have to reinstall the software needs to interact with your desktop and this time you will not get any trouble.

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  1. BEG
    Apr 4th, 2009 at 17:21
    Reply | Quote | #1

    well i’m having problems with this. This solution doesn’t help. I’m installing Radmin Service (remote desktop software). Do you have any other ideas?

  2. Stefano
    Apr 5th, 2009 at 09:46
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Which software are u installing that’s not working properly?

  3. Aleksey Krivoshein
    Apr 7th, 2009 at 14:30
    Reply | Quote | #3

    The same problem. Trying to install Mcafee agent on 2008 server. After starting service all ok.

  4. Paolo
    Oct 8th, 2009 at 10:10
    Reply | Quote | #4

    grazie,
    soluzione ottima per l’installazione di:
    Trend Server Protect 5.80 su win2008 x64 sp1

    cheers

  5. Jordi
    Nov 19th, 2009 at 17:22
    Reply | Quote | #5

    It didn’t work for me with Trendmicro Officescan Server 8.0. I have disabled the service “Interactive Services Detection” and rebooted the server. When I try again the instalation, the event generates again. In my case the problem appears when the setup software try to create a virtual web site in IIS since there’s no problem when I make the installation using apache. I’m using windows 2008 x64 R2

  6. Lester Caine
    Dec 16th, 2009 at 10:07
    Reply | Quote | #6

    OK – when I went try this out I found that “Interactive Services Detection” was not running. For TightVNC I needed to START it, so that the configuration screen was allowed to display. Once this had happened there was no problem switching it off again, and TightVNC starts happily again. However TightVNC itself would not work because I think it still needs ‘user’ input to allow it to actually view the screen.

    Running TightVNC manually ( not as a service ) it is fine, so this has something to do with just how M$ have cripped services?

  7. Scott
    Mar 24th, 2010 at 17:59
    Reply | Quote | #7

    thanks – I had to enable it for it to work for our door control system!