To find out why it's starting and then stopping, you might try looking in the Application event log after trying to start the service. Could be running into an error on (or just after) startup that is causing the service to stop.

I ran into that problem when trying to write a similar service--in my case I was trying to auto-detect the IP address to use, and it turns out it was inadvertently selecting my IPv6 loopback address and failing to bind. An error in the event log hinted at this for me.

VB.net Service Programming and using TCP Sockets
Dear fellow mathematicians,
during some gauge-theoretic explorations
I've stumble upon a recent paper by Nick Manton on Abelian higgs vortices where he studies Abelian higgs "vortices" on hyperbolic surfaces.
Does anyone have any historical knowledge of whether the word vortex in this context have any connection with point vortices from fluid dynamics? 
