It's also probably a very good idea to log the service failure in the Windows Event Log, or publish it to WMI. // c# panic(), expects message as a string parameter EventLog log = new EventLog(...); log.Write(message, EventLogEntryType.Error); Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill(); It should be noted that forcibly terminating an application without at least attempting a graceful shutdown / release of resources is a bad idea. If possible, cleanup what you can before Killing the process. Ian Mariano - Bliki | Blog "We are all wave equations in the information matrix of the universe" - me