Protection Engine service fails to start with Windows error 1053

Products

• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

• Symantec Protection Engine Service (SPE) services are down.
• When attempting to start it through services.msc console, following message appears:
  Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
• The log file (SymantecProtectionEngineAbortLog.txt) to see the error details of service failure does not exist or does not log any new errors after an attempt to start the service.

Cause

Known causes:

• Lack of system requirements.
• Software corruption.

Resolution

As a first step, delete or move the current log file (SymantecProtectionEngineAbortLog.txt, default path: C:\Program Files\Symantec\Scan Engine)
Then attempt to start the service and check if a new file is generated.

If the SPE service is set to run with any specific user, change the Log On user to default (Local System account) and try to start the service again.

If it still does not start, need to proceed as follows:

1. Confirm the presence of system requirements.
   This symptom is seen most frequently when SPE is installed on a machine with less than 4 CPUs.
2. Do one of the following:

• • Trace through the behavior using the Sysinternals Procmon tool
  • Perform a clean install of SPE

To perform a clean install of Symantec Protection Engine 

1. Backup the *.xml files from the C:\Program Files\Symantec\Scan Engine folder and take the screenshot of different/customized configuration pages.
2. From the control panel (appwiz.cpl), uninstall Symantec Protection Engine
3. Delete the folder C:\Program File\Symantec\Scan Engine
4. Reinstall Symantec Protection Engine
5. Re-configure from screenshots.

Additional Information

Protection Engine Service is not starting if running with custom user