Getting an Error 1067 when attempting to start DentrixACEServer? Two ideas to try

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Jason Shah

We moved to a new location. This means the server and client machines all moved, but physically and logically they are the same machines on the same network.

After the move, when attempting to log into Dentrix from a client machine, we started getting a message that the Dentrix server could not be found. We could ping the server and open the server’s share drive correctly, however.

Opening the server and going to Start > Services, the DentrixACEServer was stopped. Strange! This should have automatically run on boot, as it had for years previously. When attempting to start it, Windows would show an error: Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly.

One other oddity: Tailscale would no longer let me log in. It said “Log in required…”, but when I tapped on that menu item, no browser window would open. I attempted logging in with an auth key too, but still no luck.

Exploring the Event Viewer, I saw a large number of events dated 1/1/98. Strange! This server is only a few years old.

Programming note: If you need to convert Dentrix PDF reports to Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV, try Dentrix Report Converter. This is a simple service I’ve built to automate this. It is excellent for practice owners, office managers, accountants, attorneys, consultants, and anyone else who needs to quickly extract important information out of Dentrix. Dentrix holds your data hostage. Dentrix Report Converter unlocks it. Currently only $49.99 for 30 days of access, and your results are guaranteed. Thanks!

I glanced down at the clock, and bingo. The system clock was set to 1/1/98. Perhaps the internal CMOS battery died, which reset the clock when we moved it. And when the system clock is wrong, SSL connections often start failing due to clock skew.

So, if you start experiencing this issue, check your system clock and correct any skew.

Another idea, as suggested by this Reddit thread: add a new Environment Variable under System Properties:
– Variable name: OPENSSL_ia32cap
– Variable Value: ~0x200000200000000

Not using Dentrix eServices? Turn it off for a big performance gain

Posted on June 8, 2026 by Jason Shah

We stopped using Henry Schein / Dentrix eServices this past year. But we never touched the servers to specifically make any changes after doing so.

Recently, one of our Office Managers reached out to me to complain about the entire system lagging, across most of the machines on the network. I logged into the server and was immediately shown the legacy eSync window. I’ve always ignored this window, because while we used eSync in the past, I just assumed that leaving it running would do no harm.

I tried my hand at some LLM-driven diagnosis. It suggested to run Resource Monitor (Start > Run > refmon), then sort by Average CPU descening.

Low and behold: Henry Schein Practice Data Sync was consuming 25% of the CPU.

Resource Monitor showing Henry Schein Practice Data Sync (Legacy!) consuming vast swaths of CPU

Trying to confirm what this app is for is an exercise in frustration. All the links online that talk about it refer back to marketing pages. Nothing technical exists that I could find.

So, I took the Wild West approach: I just stopped the service and emailed the team with an “I’m making changes, something may break” email.

To stop the service, I went to Windows > services. I found Practice Data Sync:

Double clicked it, and tapped on Stop:

Immediately, CPU usage went down.

Next step: if the team sees no issues, I’m going to not just stop Practice Data Sync, but stop the service from running startup and stop eSync from starting on boot, and if I can figure out how, uninstall the application entirely.

Aside: I went to C:\Program Files (x86)\Henry Schein, Inc\eSync\Practice Data Sync, and look at that, there’s a >800MB file that represents the database sitting there.

Why I built RevenueRegister to track cash in our businesses

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Jason Shah

Most service businesses are stuck tracking cash in spreadsheets. Here’s why I decided to fix that, and what I learned at the checkout line that sparked the idea.

Many years ago, when Forever Dental was a single office, cash tracking was simple: a drawer, a spreadsheet, and a daily audit. The owner was in the office most days. Easy.

Then they grew. More locations, more staff turnover, more hands in the cash box and spreadsheet. Formulas broke. Data got entered wrong. Reconciling revenue became a weekly headache instead of a five-minute task. The system that worked for one office was quietly falling apart with three offices.

I’d been thinking about this problem for a while when a mundane moment turned into a lightbulb.

The grocery store moment that started everything

Last year, I was at the grocery store and got to the checkout just as a shift change was starting. I had to wait while the cashier counted out the drawer — bill by bill, coin by coin — then handed it off. The new cashier arrived with a fresh, pre-counted drawer and counted it out again before taking over.

It was a small thing, but it stuck with me. This is what real treasury controls look like at the front line. Blind counting. Shift-level accountability. An auditable handoff. Banks do this. Retailers do this. Why don’t most service businesses?

The answer, I realized, is that the tools haven’t been built for them. Most point-of-sale systems are designed for retail, with a focus on inventory, SKUs, and product catalogs. That’s overkill for a dental office that just needs to open a drawer, record a few payments, and close out at the end of the day.

So I built something simpler.

What I built: RevenueRegister

RevenueRegister.com is a cash management tool for service businesses: dental offices, auto shops, salons, and anyone else who handles cash, cards, and checks without needing a full POS system.

The core idea is borrowed directly from what I watched at that grocery store: you open a drawer session, record payments by type (cash, card, or check) throughout the day, and reconcile when you close. No spreadsheets. No broken formulas. No guessing.

Daily revenue tracking lets you log and audit revenue by category. So when someone asks “what did we bring in last Tuesday, and how much of it was cash?”, you have a real answer in seconds.

Built for teams managing multiple locations

One early focus point: this had to work for teams, not just solo operators. You can invite staff, assign roles, and manage multiple locations from a single account. Admins can switch between locations freely; staff are scoped to theirs. Everything is tracked per-location so reports stay clean and auditable.

Who it’s for

If you run a service business and you’re still tracking daily revenue in a spreadsheet, or you’ve grown to multiple locations and the spreadsheet is starting to crack, Revenue Register was built for you. It’s not trying to be a full accounting system or a retail POS. It’s the focused tool that sits between “I have cash in a drawer” and “I know exactly what came in today and who handled it.”

There’s a 14-day free trial, and onboarding takes just a few minutes. Try RevenueRegister for free today.

Fixing Windows Server 2022 not launching services after reboot

Posted on February 25, 2026 by Jason Shah

We have been having an issue where, when a specific Windows 2022 server reboots (Windows update or some other reason), after reboot:

We cannot use Tailscale to get into the server
Dentrix is not running and therefore none of the client machines can access it
Hamachi (our legacy mesh network) weirdly still sometimes works

When we log in through Hamachi after this happens, sometimes as late as the next morning, the server looks like it is just finishing rebooting. Services start up that should have been running all night. Client machines are able to connect again.

This is obviously concerning, because if we weren’t there to log in, the network would be in a bad spot when the staff started their day.

After this happened several times over the past 6 months, I think I stumbled upon the specific issue and a possible solution.

Essentially, this is a common startup race condition with the Service Control Manager (SCM), especially in Windows Server 2022.
This usually happens when the service takes too long to initialize or depends on a system resource that isn’t ready during early boot. The presence of Event ID 7000 and 7009 confirm a startup timeout.
I verified a ton of Events with ID 7000 and 7009[1] right when the reboot took place, for critical services that should have restarted (notably, Tailscale and Dentrix).

To resolve, I

Open Registry Editor and go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
Create or edit a DWORD value named: ServicesPipeTimeout
Set it to 180000 (decimal) for 3 minutes

Next I went to start > services.msc. For each service that had a 7000 or 7009 event, I switched its startup mode from Automatic to Automatic (delayed).

Then, when the staff wasn’t around, I reboot the server.

This appears to have addressed it! No more 7000 / 7009 errors, and I can successfully Tailscale into the server after a reboot.

[1]
To check for Event ID 7000 or 7009 (which indicate service startup timeouts) on Windows Server 2022, use the built-in filtering tools in Event Viewer:

Open Event Viewer: Click Start, type Event Viewer, and select Run as administrator
Navigate to System Logs: In the left-hand pane, expand Windows Logs and click on System
Filter the Log:
- In the right-hand Actions pane, click Filter Current Log…
- In the Event level section, check Critical, Warning, and Error
- In the box labeled , type 7000, 7009
- Click OK

Free Spelling Games

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Jason Shah

I’ve created five spelling games for Spelling Test Buddy. They are hugely popular on the platform, with some games being played many thousands of times per day.

But given how easy it is to rapidly create games these days, in the back of my mind I’ve always been a little bit worried about someone taking this idea of spelling games, building it themselves, and releasing it for free.

So, last week I took a minute to browse around and discovered:

A few key domains were actually available
Keyword search showed some real promise of generating traffic to those exact match domains
Ad-supported models for this are actually still pretty effective (over the medium term)

With this, I present to you FreeSpellingGames.com, where students can improve their spelling with games, for free.

FreeSpellingGames.com will contain most if not all of the spelling games found in Spelling Test Buddy. It will be ad-supported.

It is meant to let casual users and students try and play the games. For more advanced features of saved word lists, classroom management, reporting, tests and practice, however, use Spelling Test Buddy.

Enjoy!

Spelling Test Buddy in the wild

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Jason Shah

This is cool.

A journalist from the Township Journal (a local newspaper serving several counties in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) reached out because they were doing a feature on a local school Spelling Bee. They wanted to put the sample words into their web version.

We worked with them to get an embedded version of Spelling Test Buddy hosted on their article. Now, readers of the interactive version of the article, Test your skills this spelling bee season, can take a version of the same spelling test that students took, and compare how they did.

Try out the spelling test to see how you compare!

WinSxS, SysWOW64, and Installer too large

Posted on May 5, 2025 by Jason Shah

When attempting to upgrade Dentrix on our relatively new server, we encountered a “Not enough space left on C:” drive. What? We have barely anything installed on this server.

For reference, this server has a single physical 1TB hard drive. That drive is logically partitioned into C: (60GB) and D: (the rest). D: is where we place all Dentrix, images, etc. data. The server is relatively new (2022) and doesn’t have the years of accumulated cruft that older servers have.

I ran WinDirStat to get a visual of where the hard drive was being used:

Odd.

Some initial searching on Google revealed this Microsoft reference page to clean up WinSxS.

First, in an admin PowerShell, I ran:
dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

This returns:

Actual size on disk
Size of reclaimable data
Whether a cleanup is recommended

The answer to the third question was “yes”, so we ran the cleanup with:
dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

This only got us back to 8.5GB free (out of 60GB).

I followed up with:

dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

We are now up to 9.5GB free. Windows is now consuming 36.3GB of the C: drive.

In theory, this wasn’t enough to initiate the Dentrix upgrade. The Dentrix installer claims it requires 20GB (!) of free space on C: to continue. But, we tried the Dentrix upgrade again, and it went through (!!).

I’m out of options when it comes to clearing out more space on C: from these bloated Windows files. Everything I read online indicates that this is just the way Windows is, and there isn’t more we can do.

So, I feel like the next best option is to repartition D: and C: to give C: more of D:’s empty space.

Of course, reparitioning is Scary and Dangerous. I need to do a full disk backup before I do that. Which means pulling out Rufus and probably buying a giant external hard drive, before I do this.

What a mess.

UPDATE:

Using Gemini 2.5 Pro, I explored this problem a little more. The suggestions were:

The 60GB I have on Drive C: was definitely not enough
My idea of repartitioning is the right one
I need to do a bare metal backup first

(Of course, the LLM is probably just reconfirming what I told it as the problem, because I pointed it to the first part of this blog post as the initial context.)

I have a NAS on-site, with 500+ GB of free space in a RAID configuration. Looks like this is enough to store the bare-metal backup, so no need to go buy storage space.

I set up Windows Server Backup, and started a test bare metal backup. That backup completed and only required 212GB of drive space.

So, now that that works, I need to schedule to run the backup then repartition the drive, in person. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:

Success!

I created a bootable USB drive of gparted with the gparted-live-1.7.0-1-amd64.iso (the latest as of this writing, and also optimized for x64 CPUs), using balenaEtcher on my Mac. I then drove over to the office on a Friday night.

I booted into the USB drive, and gparted loaded fine.

I change the drives as follows:

Shrink D: by 140GB
Move the empty space to be between C: and D:
Expand C: by 140GB

I kicked it off. Unfortunately, no one told me it would be a ~5 hour job beforehand. Good thing I started it on Friday night!

I came back Saturday morning, rebooted the server, and tested it out. Everything works! No catastrophic recovery required!

Side note: I found at least 3 commercial Windows products that allow repartitioning/resizing. All of them cost at least $250 for a business/enterprise license that would work with Windows Server. Doing the math, it was worth me driving to and from the office twice to save $250, as I used that time to get other things done while I was there as well.

Introducing Vocab Word Study

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Jason Shah

I built an app called Vocab Word Study. It’s on the iOS App Store and it’s currently free.

I built it to help my 6th grade kids start to build a stronger vocabulary[1]. I didn’t like what was out there, and wanted something that:

Is very simple and short to use on a daily basis,
Requires them to write a sentence using the word, and
Is very specific to the kinds of words they are going to see in literature and on standardized tests in high school and beyond.

Try it out, and give it a 5-star rating if you can!

How we speed up Dentrix clients on our network

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Jason Shah

For our various office networks with Dentrix clients and Dentrix server (we are running standard Dentrix, not Enterprise edition and not Ascend), here are a list of things that are part of our provisioning checklist that we do to speed them up:

Disable LLMNR

LLMNR (Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution) is a protocol based on the Domain Name System packet format that allows both IPv4 and IPv6 hosts to perform name resolution for hosts on the same local link. It allows host name resolution without the requirement of a DNS server. While it’s in theory useful, in practice we have not needed on our networks for at least a decade now. And in certain scenarios disabling it both speeds up our network and slightly improves security in the case of an incident. Here is how to disable LLMNR, and some research that we’ve discovered.

Reduce Windows Defender’s scope

How many times has your computer come to a crawl, and when you open Task Manager it’s because the “Antimalware Service Executable” is running at 100%? This is Windows Defender, and it’s unstoppable. Literally, you cannot stop it. It gets to decide when to run, and often it feels like the best time is right in the middle of the day, when patients are in the chair.

To help reduce its impact, we’ve started to exclude a few applications from it, like so:

Control Panel > System and Security > Security and Maintenance > Virus Protection
Virus and Threat Protection Settings > Manage Settings
Add or remove exclusions
Add Process > MsMpEng.exe
Add Folder > C:\Program Files (x86)\Dentrix

Add any others that are getting caught in its net that run all the time (e.g. your imaging software).

Disable fetching of start menu web content

The Start Menu takes a long time to open because it fetches web content before popping up. To disable web search in the Start Menu, open PowerShell as an administrator and run this:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" -Name "BingSearchEnabled" -Value 0 -Type DWord

Then reboot.

Source for this one.

Disable Fast Startup

This is a new one for us (at the time of this writing). A vendor was training the team on a new piece of software. The workstation they picked was running extremely slowly. She said, “have you restarted it and not just shut it down? I’ve been told that you have to restart it”. Then she proceeded to show that the machine claimed it had not been restarted in 2 weeks (when it had been shut down almost every night)!

After researching this, it turns out that, in an attempt to speed up Windows start, on some machines Windows will save the OS state on shut down, then reload that same state (memory leaks and all) on startup. This is called Fast Startup, and it’s been a part of Windows since Windows 8.

We’ve started to disable Fast Startup entirely. It’s a Control Panel > Power setting, and you can find screenshots about how to do so online. I’m not sure yet what kind of impact this will have, especially on those perniciously slow machines, but hopefully it will be a positive one!

I’ll continue to add and revise this as new tricks come up. If you have other ones, please feel free to comment.

How to install Dentrix 24.1 onto a remote workstation

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Jason Shah

For years now, whenever we swapped out a desktop and needed Dentrix reinstalled, our staff would call Dentrix Support to have them do the installation manually. This is because, sometime 5-10 years ago, when you double-clicked on “setup.exe” it just wouldn’t work. It often complained about missing components, .NET runtime versions, or similar. I think Crystal Reports was a frequent culprit. This was a far cry from when we bought the practice >15 years ago, when I could install Dentrix without much issue by putting in the CD(!) into the tray and running setup.

Today, I needed to get Dentrix set up on a remote computer to test some things. But I had no interest in calling Support to make this happen. I was determined, determined I say, to get this done myself.

Instructions

Note that these instructions were written for Dentrix 24 with Windows 10 Pro (10.0.19045 build 19405). I’m certain that they will break in the future. All of the steps below need to take place on the workstation.

Navigate to \\[server]\DTXCommon\Installs\
Copy the 24.1.1.17965 folder (or whatever is the latest one you see) to the workstation. I also copied the sibling files over to the Workstation as well, for good measure; not sure if that’s required or not. So, if this is what my server contained in \\[server]\DTXCommon\Installs\ :

then this is what my workstation contained in my working folder:

WARNING: even with the reduced number of files copied, this still required 3.2GB on disk.
Try to run 24.1.1.17965\setup.exe . It will probably fail with an error about Crystal Reports.
So, try to run Crystal Reports installation first. Find it in 24.1.1.17965\ISSetupPrerequisites\{CrystalReports-13-0-32bit-Prereq}\CRRuntime_32bit_13_0.msi . But, for me, this failed with Error 1904. Module C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Common\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win32_x86\crtslv.dll failed to register. HRESULT -2147010895. Contact your support personnel. If it works for you and you don’t get this error, great; you can probably go back to step 3 and run the setup.exe for Dentrix again.
After digging around the Internet, I found this answer on StackOverflow, which gave me the hint I needed. We have to reinstall the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable package. I found that on Microsoft’s website. Note: be sure to download the 32-bit version, because that’s what Crystal Reports relies on here apparently.
When you try to install the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable package, that may fail with an error if you already have one installed. I had to go to Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, and uninstall Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable (x64) 14.12.25810 first. After I did that, I rebooted, then worked backwards from here:
- Installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable Package (32-bit version), per line 5 above
- Installed Crystal Reports via the CRRuntime_32bit_13_0.msi file, per line 4 above
- Installed Dentrix via the setup.exe, per line 3 above

Other notes

Using Dentrix Workstation over a TailScale VPN is significantly slower than using Remote Desktop to the server or another workstation. There must be a ton of synchronous round trip calls made within Dentrix, with the (not invalid, at the time it was created!) assumption that your server and your workstations will all be connected to a high-speed intranet network.