CRM 2011 – Windows could not start the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service

I had a red alert today when a customers recently live CRM installation completely stopped working.

It stop working so badly that no one could even log in and when you tried to the screen just mentioned a Generic SQL error.

When ever you cannot login into CRM the first thing to check is Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service because if this has stopped so has CRM.

I tried to restart the service and then it complained it couldn’t logon.

I wasn’t sure what had happened here, it was one of those times when no one had touched the system and it had just gone down.

I tried to repair CRM 2011 by going to Add Remove Programs, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Repair.  This gave me the exact reason it wasn’t working, which is a nice surprise because most error messages point in some vague direction of the problem or sometimes in completely the opposite direction.

Basically the password for the user I set up to run the web services part of CRM (App pools) and the CRM ASync services needed to change his password because it had expired.

To resolve this problem you need to get the IT person to change the settings on the active directory user to make the password never expire (otherwise CRM will stop working every month\couple of months).  The setting is in

Account–> Account Options –> Password never expires

I confirmed this by trying to log onto the CRM Server as that user and it asked me to change my password.  DON’T change the password because then you will have to change the password in all the places the user is used or run the CRM Repair to do it for you.

once the option for the password to never expired is ticked, the CRM Async services should magically start to run again and CRM will be back and working.

Luckily for me I managed to do this before the customer had time to call in and complain.