So we have always had issues where the escalation service needed an occasional restart. So much so we setup an alert if business critical escalation rules don't get actioned after 10 minutes - service polls ever 5 minutes.

However on the last couple of occasions a restart hasnt worked - service starts but doesnt appear to do anything.

A sympton is that it doesnt write to the escalation log file.

I tried all the usual thing ie server reboot, iisreset, recreated one of the rules, disabled enabled the rules but it refuses to work.

This might not matter but the service doesnt stop within the time windows expects it to - it hangs.

As a last effort I tried running as an application ie crmescalationservice.exe /R

Randomly this worked instantly - escalation log was updated and records were being processed again.

This is not a solution though! Does anyone have any ideas why it doesnt work when run as a service (which it has done for many years) but it does work in application mode???

All help / suggestions appreciated .