I had an issue with installing Exchange 2010 whereby installation took an age and the MS Exchange RPC Client Access service failed to start. I’ve had a similar issue in the past with DoubleTake, so applied the same troubleshooting and workaround.
To troubleshoot, I established that the MS Exchange RPC Client Access service is trying to listen on a particular port, so looked to see why that might not be able to. Firewall off, start MSExchangeRPC service – fail. Check for other software installed – (no AV) – the only other software is some asset management software called NetSupportDNA. Found the service for that, stopped the service, start MSExchangeRPC service – success, start NetSupportDNA service – success. Modified the service startup type for NetSupportDNA service to Automatic (delayed start) and for good measure added a dependency on the MSExchangeRPC service (new multistringvalue in regedit). A small screen capture is included at the end of this post.
During further Exchange server installations I’ll stop the NetSupportDNA service (it doesn’t need to be running all the time) and then modify the parameters before a server reboot (I exported the registry key and whittled it down to these two items).
The client finds this an acceptable workaround. I’ll need to do it on the mailbox servers as well as clients connect directly to them for Public Folders.
While this is a fairly specific problem, as I said at the beginning, I came across a similar issue previously so I’m really just highlighting the delayed start service startup type and how it can be used to workaround issues.