Hi Shane,
Perhaps Cruise Control is just adding a bit of indirection. If EA interprets this too strictly you could have a background problem.
Please note that the following discussion is prefixed with "I'm guessing. Please apply that sentiment throughout as you read on. Remember that I have not tried your configuration myself, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
I'm guessing that you are running into yet another variation of the licensing dialog. Windows services cannot have any interaction with the UI. It used to be that some programs simply could not be set up as services, let alone run in that mode. These days it seems that more programs can be installed as services even if they might interact with the UI, only to fail at run time.
Perhaps Windows is starting EA before it impersonates your designated user account, or something like that. EA always asks for a license key the first time it is run under any user account. Even if EA has been set up for all users and successfully activated on that machine, it will ask for a key if you log into a different user account and start EA from there.
So, you probably have to make absolutely sure that you have run EA from the user account that you designate for the service. I suggest you go through this by hand. First create a Windows account with the necessary privileges to run a service. Try running some (any) service application - find one that you can use as a benign trial - from this account, just to ensure that the Windows end of the process is sound. Then run EA by hand from that account and enter a license key. Note that bittercoder used the -Embedding switch. You might want to ensure that you do the equivalent. [Perhaps EA would interpret different invocation methods as different credentials, and ask for a key for each method.]
If you get to that point then you can test whether you can run the EA service at all. Try setting it up to start automatically, then stop and restart it. If that works then try attaching from an external process.
Finally, you are left with the issue of account security. You should take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that 'casual' users cannot log into the service account you are using. The privilege levels would be inappropriate for direct login. [Depending on how you set up the account, it would be either too privileged for general use, or too restrictive for effective use from the desktop. It does not matter which, the account should not be directly accessible to the general user population.]
Let us know,
David
