Sharepoint workflow stuck on "starting"

[Dan]

I have configured several large workflows to run when an item is created in a
list. Recently all new workflows are stuck in the "starting" state and will
not run. If I change them to run on manual kickoff they work fine. This is
causing me a great deal of trouble and I have tried restarting services,
rebooting, etc.. to no avail. also if I create a new site in this application
and try to add workflows these will not get past 'starting' either. Please
advise.

Dan C

[henry]

I'm experiencing something similar and it just started happening this week. I
wonder if some Microsoft update over the weekend did something to the timer
jobs.
--
http://www.henryong.com

Post by Dan
I have configured several large workflows to run when an item is created in a
list. Recently all new workflows are stuck in the "starting" state and will
not run. If I change them to run on manual kickoff they work fine. This is
causing me a great deal of trouble and I have tried restarting services,
rebooting, etc.. to no avail. also if I create a new site in this application
and try to add workflows these will not get past 'starting' either. Please
advise.
Dan C

[Tony Testa]

Dan,

Recently I ran into what sounds like the exact same problems you were
having. I put up 2 blog postings about it.

http://www.tonytestasworld.com/post/Howto-Start-a-Sharepoint-Workflow-Programmatically.aspx
http://www.tonytestasworld.com/post/Sharepoint-2007-Workflow-stuck-in-quot3bStartingquot3b-state-and-never-completes-when-set-to-start-programmatically.aspx

In a nutshell, my problem was that I didn't have a Shared Services
Provider setup on the Sharepoint Admin Site. In addition, I didn't
have the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service running (i think it
shows up as OWSATimer.exe or something like that in your running
processes). Once I created the Shared Services Provider and made sure
the Windows SharePoint Services Timer was running, the workflows moved
from the "Starting" stage and ran as normal. It seems like the
WorkflowManager needs to be kicked off by the Service Timer, whereas
when you run the workflow manually your forcing it to run.

Let me know if this helps.

Post by Dan
I have configured several large workflows to run when an item is created in a
list. Recently all new workflows are stuck in the "starting" state and will
not run. If I change them to run on manual kickoff they work fine. This is
causing me a great deal of trouble and I have tried restarting services,
rebooting, etc.. to no avail. also if I create a new site in this application
and try to add workflows these will not get past 'starting' either. Please
advise.
Dan C