System Event Notification Service, App-V and logon failure

Located a very nice KB-article and wanted to be able to locate it again – hopefully it becomes more searchable using key words involved! Thanks to Justin Zarb for the find – personally, this was missed in a spreadsheet of articles that should have been on top of my head.

You may experience the following issues after you log on to a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2:

  • Your desktop does not load. You only see a blue or black background image.
  • Windows Explorer does not run, and you cannot access your data.
  • You receive the following message in a notification balloon:

Failed to connect to a windows service. Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service (SENS). This problem prevents limited users from logging on to the system. As an administrative user, you can review the System Event Log for details about why the service didn’t respond.

When the issue occurs, a service host that contains the following services crashes on system startup:

  • Certificate Propagation
  • Extensible Authentication Protocol
  • Group Policy Client
  • IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules
  • IP Helper
  • Server
  • Multimedia Class Scheduler
  • User Profile Service
  • Task Scheduler
  • System Event Notification Service
  • Shell Hardware Detection
  • Themes
  • Windows Management Instrumentation

You may experience this issue after you install certain applications, for example Microsoft Application Virtualization Client ( App-V ), on the computer.
Note You have to restart the computer one or more times to recover from this issue.

See this article; http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2590550