Whenever a change is made to the PXE Configuration, the PXE Config Helper service will stop the PXE Server and MTFTP server, implement the change, and then start the services up again. The problem lies in when one of the services is busy. If a service is busy, it will not stop when requested. The PXE Config Helper service will retry it's attempt to stop the service multiple times, but after a number of attempted retries will crash the PXE Config Helper service. Since PXE requests are generally short, within the retries usually the PXE Server service will stop. The TFTP server may take longer to stop if it's currently allowing a client to download from it, then causing the Config Helper to crash leaving the PXE Config Helper and PXE Server services stopped while the MTFTP service is still running. The PXE Monitor utility I created can help work around this, checking at given intervals and starting up the Config Helper service. This isn't guaranteed to always work, and there's also the downtime between intervals. In trying to think of a better solution until I'm ready to upgrade to DS 7.x, I wondered if I could get the PXE Config Helper service to ignore the state of the MTFTP server. I discovered that in the PXEManager.ini there's a section for the PXE Services with the names of the services. In this [PXEServer\Shared\ConfigService] section it has PxeServices="Altiris PXE MTFTP Server", "Altiris PXE Server". By removing the MTFTP server from the list and restarting the PXE Manager and PXE Config Helper, the Config Helper service would then only worry about the PXE Server. I tested this, and sure enough when I made a change to the PXE configuration only the PXE Server service and PXE Config Helper services restarted, the MTFTP Server service kept running. Because the Config Helper is no longer managing the TFTP server service, we'll need to set it to start automatically. Once that's done, we're up and running without needing to worry about the TFTP service not stopping in time and causing the Config Helper (and conversely the PXE Server) to stop. So to recap: