One of our Windows 2003 servers became inaccessible via RDP.  All other services were fine/ (eg FTP/HTTP) When we got a console into the machine I noticed that the Terminal Services service was stopped and I didn’t have the option of starting it due to the menu being greyed out. I suspect a windows update had caused this.

First of all make sure the RPC service is started. RDP is dependent on this service. It didn’t help in this case and I got the annoying grayed-out menu!

As this didn’t fix the issue we’ll need to kill the “TermService” process.  To find the PID for this service open up a command prompt and type:

 tasklist /svc /fi “imagename eq svchost.exe”

This will output all the PIDs that associated with svchost.eve

As you’ll see the PID relating to TermSerice is “2160”

Now we can just kill this process by opening up Task Manager and right clicking the process and selecting “End Process”. Before you do this you may need to add a  PID column to the view as I believe its not on by default. To do this select View from within Task Manager -> Select Columns -> tick the PID (Process Identifier). 

I was now able to start the Terminal Services service from within Services successfully.