SSRS service might not start after installing Windows Security patches and rebooting the machine

Sometimes, if your server is under heavy load, or after installing Windows Security patches, like https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-004.mspx , you might experience issues where the SSRS service fails to start with the following information being logged in the Windows Event Logs:

The SQL Server Reporting Services (MSSQLSERVER) service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

The main reason for which this might happen is that the maximum allowed time for a service start operation has been surpassed. By default, the timeout is set to 30 seconds, which can be a little short in some situations. Therefore, the first thing to try would be to increase the timeout period.

As to the causes for which more time is needed for a service startup, for SQL builds lower than CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 (9.0.3282), this issue might be caused by the fact that the service, before loading the assemblies, needs to verify the Certificate Revocation List from https://CRL.microsoft.com.

Having this in mind, the options you have for addressing similar behaviors are:

1. Adding an entry to the HOSTS file (%Windows%\System32\Drivers\ETC) to direct the service to an invalid IP while trying to reach CRL.Microsoft.com. An example would be adding the following line:

127.0.0.1crl.microsoft.com

2. Increasing the value that corresponds to the maximum time allowed for starting a service. Changing this value will have no negative impact, but require a reboot of the machine. This solution is described in the article: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/922918 , but in short, you must change (or create) the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control,ServicesPipeTimeout (DWORD) to specify a value sufficient to allow the service to start. This value represents the timeout in milliseconds. (An example of a valid value is 60000)

3. Installing CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/953752 .

4. Installing SP3 for SQL Server 2005

- Download page : https://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=AE7387C3-348C-4FAA-8AE5-949FDFBE59C4&displaylang=en

- List of fixes: https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=955706

- Readme files: https://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=851C39EE-6F9D-47D9-8ECC-44AC1E9DC182&displaylang=en

- Main page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895958.aspx