Krystian Bigaj replied this in a separate email, which led to some interesting information that I would like to share in this mailing list.
He suggested the use of the "Process Monitor" app to log the process events during the startup of the service and look for "ACCESS DENIED" errors. Here is what I found. During the startup, there were indeed several ACCESS DENIED errors:
Date & Time: 6/12/2014 9:27:41 AM Event Class: Registry Operation: RegOpenKey Result: ACCESS DENIED Path: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options TID: 1964 Duration: 0.0000451 Desired Access: Query Value, Enumerate Sub KeysI had similar problem (but with initdb.exe).
Solution in your case is to add BUILTIN\Users group to your "postgres" account (this which you will use to start PG service).
Let me know if this helps.
PS. Don't change permissions on registry/file, because you will end up with a mess :)
Of course your PG data directory must have Full access for postgress account. Also your binaries must have a Read+Execute access for postgress. In most cases adding that BUILTIN\Users group to postgress will work, but I had a case, where end-user installed our software on drive where Users group had Deny permissions.
To sum it all:
- directory with your pgdata - Full access for postgress account
- PG installation dir (so parent of bin) - Read+Execute for postgress account
- postgres account must be member of BUILTIN\Users (!)
- if you are redirecting Log to other directory, then this dir also have to Full access for postgres account.
