One cause of a grey button is when the Little Green Button windows service either fails to start or has stopped.

First, confirm the service is running by right clicking your button and choosing the About option.

In the window that opens, click the Technical Info button.

This will open a window where we can view all technical information relating to your Little Green Button. Towards the top you can see the status of the service.


In this case the Service is missing altogether. Please Reinstall the software to ensure it is placed back, and ensure there are no virus scanner solutions or security suites marking this as malicious, subsequently removing the underlying service.



In this case the service has been stopped. This mostly happens on PC's that are slightly older and have a lot going on at startup. If necessary and as a temporary solution, the PC can be restarted. However the same problem may be encountered until the below fix has been implemented.


Automatic Delayed Start


To fix the Little Green Button and prevent this from reoccuring, we have to get the service back up and running, and set it to start with a delay after the computer starts.


  1. Click start and type services.msc in the search. Start the Services app.
  2. Scroll down the list of services and find Little Green Button.
  3. Double-click it or right click and choose Properties to open the service's settings.
  4. Change the startup type to Automatic (Delayed Start)
  5. Press the Start button to start the service back up. The Little Green Button will go green again.
  6. As a fail safe, you could set the below options in the Recovery tabs.
  7. Press the OK button to close the window, and close down the Services app.


Registry fix for extended Auto Start Delay

Automatic Delayed Start time defaults to 2 minutes. If the buttons are still turning grey i.e the service is not starting, the time period can be extended.
However, it will increase the time that ALL delayed services take to startup.

Contact our support who can supply a reg file that automatically adjusts the Automatic Delayed Start time period.

Alternatively, for advanced users this can be implemented manually in the registry, see below.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]
Add a new DWORD called AutoStartDelay, select the Base as Decimal and enter a value in milliseconds e.g  240000 equals 4 minutes.