Dentrix services not starting on boot (2023 edition)

Last week, we experienced catastrophic failures with Dentrix. Every attempt to launch Office Manager, Appointment Book, Family File and Ledger, on the server and all workstations, crashed within seconds of launch.

Our system:

  • Dentrix 23.2.3.6311
  • Windows Server 2019 Essentials
  • 15+ workstations

We were without Dentrix for 6 hours while Dentrix Support uninstalled then reinstalled (!) Dentrix. That resolved it at the time, but it was not clear as to why it worked (and Support had no idea either).

A week later, Windows Update (KB5026362) downloaded on a Thursday, but did not yet install.

We restarted the server on the following Saturday and let the Windows Update complete. On Sunday, we attempted to launch Dentrix. Appointment Book and Office Manager would spin for a few seconds, then crash and shut down, on the server and on all workstations. Mild panic ensued. Interestingly, Document Center, Office Journal, and Timeclock still worked.

We attempted these things, none of which worked:

  • We re-enabled LLMNR
  • We uninstalled KB5026362

Lots of Google searching and deep thinking, we looked at Server Manager, and noticed that not all services were being launched at start (there was a red 5 next to it, indicating that 5 services did not launch). One of those was DtxUpdaterSrv. It listed status of “Stopped” but startup type of “Automatic”. Which means, it attempted to start but couldn’t. On a whim, I started the service manually, and immediately the broken applications started working

Digging deeper, I saw that these services, along with DentrixACEServer, all had attempted to start on system boot. None of them completed; every one of them had an Event log that showed “A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the … Service service to connect”.

With some searching, I came across this ServerFault post on how to change the default timeout from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. I applied the change and rebooted. The Dentrix services came up on the reboot, so things may be better! Only time will tell of course.

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