[Pcsclite-muscle] Windows PC/SC and SCARD_E_SERVICE_STOPPED

[Diego de Felice]

Just some info from my experience, being a developer of a smart card middleware: I started facing a weird problem from Windows 8 installed as virtual machine, the Smart Card service suddendly stopped after some times. After some search, I discovered that a new "feature" has been added to Windows, where services, despite being set as Automatic Start, they could be stopped automatically if no work is needed, imagine the surprise to know that "Smart Card Service" is stopped when no REAL smart card reader are connected to the machine... This is a big problem on VMs because there are no physical screader connected and this same behaviour cause my middleware big problems on really slow PCs: when Windows starts, sometimes the screader is recognized after the SCService starts, so... the service stops, and my middleware doesn't work!!! Still figuring out how to solve this problem, because it's very difficult to debug in dev environment.

Hope it helps.

Here the reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/hh849637(v=ws.11)#smart-card-service-start-and-stop-behavior