I have a Windows service named Tor Win32 Service that was installed by the Tor installer today but does not start. I get the message Windows could not start the Tor Win32 Service service on Local Computer. Error 1064: An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request. The service is installed with this path to the executable
"E:\...\tor browser\browser\torbrowser\tor\tor.exe" --nt-service "-f" "e:\...\tor browser\browser\torbrowser\data\tor\torrc"
This post https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/15207/problems-with-starting-the-tor-service-on-windows-10-error-1064 suggests that the problem (when running the service for a Tor relay) is the log file path in torrc. But (a) I fixed that and it did not solve the problem and (b) I don't want to run a Tor relay anyway, I need the service to provide a proxy for my Python program.
I raised a ticket at the Tor project about this and got the following response:
Tor we ship in Tor Browser is not to be meant to be a standalone Tor. If you want to have a standalone Tor on Windows please use the expert bundle https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/7.0.11/tor-win32-0.3.1.9.zip
So I took the advice and downloaded the recommended package and the tor.exe in that package works perfectly, both from the command line and as a service.
A.N.'s comment/question "is it the correct Tor executable?" was right on the money, though I didn't read that until after I had solved the problem. And until then I wouldn't have known how to answer it. ("Is it the correct executable? How would I know? How is one supposed to tell? The one I have won't even tell me what version it is.")
It is a puzzle to me that the Tor Browser bundle contains a program called tor.exe, and installs it as a service, when the file is not meant to be a program you can actually run. I do realize that .exe files are not always really executable, and can be simply repositories of binary resources. But you don't install such files as services. Having two files called tor.exe, one which is meant to be executed and the other not, does strike me as unnecessarily obscure.