I have done some work developing a Windows Service and have had some success in doing so.
I notice that some services run as the user Network Service. I wondered what the difference of behaviour is when running as this service.
The service I am developing tracks logins and logouts and so it would be beneficial to try and have the service start before the user logs in.
I would expect Network Services run external to any given login session but I may not understand this correctly.
If it is not possible to make sure a service will definitely start before a user logs in I may have to do some detection within the service to see if a user is already logged in at the time the service starts.
Any information you could provide about ways of affecting the behaviour of services would be helpful as MSDN has a lot of information but sometimes there are gaps or some things are not clear.