After you download updates from Windows Updates on a Windows Vista computer, you may experience following symptoms:

• You receive a dialog appears that indicates that the host process for Windows Services has stopped working.
• After you restart the computer, a Windows Update dialog box appears. This dialog box contains the following message:
  

  Some Updates were not installed
  Failed: xx updates
  Error(s) Found:
  Code 800706BA

The parental controls built into Windows Vista are designed to help parents manage what their children can do on the computer. For this to work, the applications you wish to control access to must be compatible with Windows Parental Controls, and this service must be enabled. If you don’t have kids, or don’t care to restrict the access they have on your computer, then this service can safely be disabled, though it won’t use any resources unless you specifically configure Windows Parental Controls. Keep reading →

As described by the program manager for Offline Files in Windows Vista, this feature “enables access to files on an SMB server even when the client is not connected to the server.” This service maintains the Offline Files cache, located by default at c:\windows\csc. If you don’t access files from a server, or don’t require offline access to files you do access from a server, then it is safe to disable this service. Keep reading →

The Network Store Interface service is one of the more important services, necessary if you wish to connect to a network. The service keeps track of what network interfaces you have, stores routing information for each, and communicates this information with other services that require it. Disable this one, and the rest of the world disappears. Keep reading →

The Network Location Awareness service works with the Network List service to keep you (and your applications) informed of the status of your network connections. With this service disabled your ‘Network and Sharing Center’ won’t be able to detect the status of your network connection. You also won’t get any status information from the Network Connection notification icon in the tray. If you don’t rely on those features, you might be able to get away without this one. Keep reading →

The Network List service works with the Network Location Awareness service to keep you (and your applications) informed of the status of your network connections. With this service disabled your ‘Network and Sharing Center’ won’t be able to detect the status of your network connection. You also won’t get any status information from the Network Connection notification icon in the tray. If you don’t rely on those features, you might be able to get away without this one. Keep reading →

There isn’t much information available for this service. The generic description makes it seem important, but I’ve looked high and low and can’t even find a “Network and Dial-Up Connections” folder. On my machine this service was started, so something woke it from it’s Manual startup mode, but I’ve disabled the service, and have not notice any reduced functionality. If you use Internet Connection Sharing, you’ll need to leave this one alone, otherwise, this one should be safe to disable for most users. Keep reading →

New in Windows Vista, the Network Access Protection Agent service is used for controlling network access of a computer based on its ‘health’. The ‘health’ of the system is determined by a policy defined by the network administrator which might measure parameters like anti-virus signature level, firewall status, or OS patch levels in an effort to determine if the computer is ‘fit’ enough to be a peer on the network. This is only needed for Enterprise installations and requires Windows Server 2008 to do the ‘health check’, but since it is set to Manual by default, there is no benefit to disabling it. Keep reading →

When a computer is joined to a domain, the Netlogon service allows users and services to authenticate to the domain through a secure channel. If your computer is not part of a domain, you do not need this service, but since it is only run manually, there is no benefit to disabling it. Keep reading →

A part of WCF, the Net.Tcp Port Sharing service enables net.tcp ports to be shared across multiple user processes. Microsoft notes that “The Net.TCP Port Sharing Service does expose several configuration options that allow you to manipulate several characteristics of the network sockets owned by the port sharing service.” It is for this security reason that the service is disabled by default, and an administrator must manually enable it the first time. Keep reading →