Windows could not start the SharePoint 2010 Administration Service

I have restored our SharePoint 2010 farm in a lab ahead of a disaster recovery test and everything seemed to go well apart from being unable to start the SharePoint 2010 Administration service – it threw this error message:

Windows could not start the SharePoint 2010 Administration Service on Local Computer.

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

I was able to log into our Intranet and the Central Administration so everything seemed fine otherwise.  I turned to the Event Logs but didn’t find anything useful.  A bit of searching turned up this Microsoft article that suggested that the service is likely to be querying Windows Update to retrieve a certificate trust list.  This simply wasn’t happening as the lab has no internet access.  I modified the registry as suggested and after a reboot the service started straight away!  Here is the registry key required to stop the service attempting to update the certificate trust list:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\AuthRoot – DisableRootAutoUpdate (DWord value 1)