I am switching back from using thin inside a service to mongrel_service, because when my thin-process is killed somehow, the service stills seems to be running. Mongrel_service can cope with this much better: it also keeps a check on your ruby process and restarts it if needed (at least in the old version, i hope the 0.4.beta3 prerelease version behaves the same). When using the mongrel_service (gem install mongrel_service --pre) on ruby 1.8.7 you can no longer have a space inside the name. So if you run the following command: [bash] mongrel_rails service::install -N "Name with a space" -c c:\path\to\your\app -p 4000 -e production [/bash] there will be no output as to whether it succeeded or not on XP, on Windows Server 2008 a more appropriate error is shown; but the service will not be created. The trouble is the name: it contains a space, and apparently that is no longer allowed. On the old MRI and previous mongrel_service it was not a problem. The old version, however, does not work in ruby 1.8.7 from rubyinstaller.org, due to a dependency to some very specific Visual C++ code regarding service communication (and now the ruby is compiled using gcc). Luckily there is an easy fix, as suggested by Luis Lavena himself: [bash] mongrel_rails service::install -N name_without_space -D "Name with a space" -c c:\path\to\your\app -p 4000 -e production [/bash]