Background service not available, Windows 7

[smiffypr]

This has just happened to me. I've been happily running NPVR for ages. Its on an XP machine.
4 days ago, I got the service stopped warning and was in the same situation as this. Unable to start service message using Start NPVR Service and Could not start NPVR message if I tried to start it from Services. I couldn't find a problem, so reinstalled an archive of C:
Everything worked for 4 days, now it has suddenly happened again. (Recordings stopped sometime between 10:30 pm yesterday and 12:00 pm today).
Event Viewer shows NRecord.exe failing at 12:58:04 today and .NETRuntime 2.0 errors when I tried to restart nrecord
Turned off windows firewall and Avast real time shields, no change.
I tried ticking Use Background Recording Service (and re-booted), and Services shows NPVR Recording Service as Started. Start/Stop NPVR Service also works again.
I don't know what caused the change in behaviour, but it seems to be working OK again now (with Use Background Recording Service ticked).

[Gronda]

Progress!

Yesterday I installed the network tools as Servalan suggested and after being somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff that was being logged, went away to play in other areas for a bit. As part of this I dug out an old USB drive and plugged this in to act as a new store for the recorded TV (my HTPC only has an SSD as all my media is stored on NAS boxes and so far I've been setting NPVR to record to a Buffalo Linkstation NAS box).

It seems that NPVR will happily record to the local USB mounted drive, but doesn't want to know with the NAS box. So it appears that the problem is solved after a fashion.

I may dig further in to what is preventing the system from working over the network and will report back any useful findings to this thread.

But for now, thanks to all for the help and the great piece of software that means I can turn WMC off