What is services.exe?

Services.exe is the Services Control Manager. It’s part of Microsoft Windows Operating System. Services.exe is a remote procedure call (RPC) that manages creating, deleting, starting, and stopping Windows services. The Services Control Manager (services.exe) is responsible for maintaining the database of installed services, starting services and driver services either upon system startup or upon demand, maintaining status information for running services and driver services, enumerating installed services and driver services, locking and unlocking the service database, and transmitting control requests to running services. Services.exe is usually located in the %SYSTEM% sub-folder and its usual size is 42,713 bytes.

Important: NEVEG.B can mask itself as services.exe. Scan your computer with Auslogics Antivirus to make sure it's not infected.

The Service Control Manager maintains a database of installed services in the Windows registry. The database is used by services.exe and programs that add, modify, and configure services. The database is stored under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services registry key.

An initial copy of the database is created when the operating system is installed. The database contains entries for the device drivers that are required during system boot. The database includes the service type, startup type, fully qualified path of the service executable, error control level, optional dependency information and optional account name and password about each installed service and driver service. During system boot, the services.exe process starts all auto-start services and the services on which they depend.

When a service is started, the Service Control Manager retrieves the account information stored in the database, logs on the service account, loads user profile, creates the service in the suspended state, assigns the logon token to the process, and allows the process to execute.