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I've upgraded two systems from Windows 7 to 10 and both have the MSMQ service installed after upgrade. None of those systems had it installed before.

The presence of the service is not a problem in itself, but it or a dependency service is listening on TCP port 80 via Microsoft HTTP API (System process PID 4) and I can't start Apache because of that.

So far my searches for answers have been fruitless, because most results I find are dealing with setup and configuration of MSMQ but not it's purpose on a freshly installed Win10 system.

I have two questions:

  1. What is the purpose of MSMQ service in Windows 10 systems?
  2. Can the service(s) be disabled (or set to manual start) without any ill side effects?
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What is MSMQ?

From Microsoft:

Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) technology enables applications running at different times to communicate across heterogeneous networks and systems that may be temporarily offline. MSMQ provides guaranteed message delivery, efficient routing, security, and priority-based messaging. It can be used to implement solutions for both asynchronous and synchronous messaging scenarios.

From a user on Stack Overflow:

It's just a queue manager.

You can Send objects (serialized) to the queue where they will stay until you Receive them. It's normally used to send messages or objects between applications in a decoupled way.

It has nothing to do with webservices, they are two different things

Can you disable it? What happens?

When the MSMQ service is uninstalled the following actions are also carried out:

  1. All existing queues and queue configuration information is deleted
  2. All messages contained in those queue and the system dead letter queue (DLQ) is deleted

(Source)

In a nutshell

The service started coming installed on Windows 8 and up systems (to my knowledge), which may be why you didn't see it on 7. Removing it only affects itself, and if you aren't using it then nothing should be affected.

Disabling the service you know how to do, but you can also remove it using Add & Remove Features

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  • Wow! I didn't expect such a good and detailed answer so fast. Although, I had read the description on TechNet and I know how to remove components. What I want to know is what Windows 10 components require MSMQ. Mail app? IIRIC, I haven't seen MSMQ running on Win8 systems. goes to check
    – AndyDeGroo
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 5:48
  • Hmm, I'm quite curious too. Can't seem to find anything anywhere in regards to what MSMQ is a dependent of. However I highly doubt it's for anything front-end like the Mail App, or anything too crucial. Wikipedia points out it's mainly used for Windows Platform based contact center applications
    – Insane
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 5:51
  • I can confirm that Win8 doesn't have MSMQ installed. We could try to determine what's using it by enabling MSMQ end-to-end tracing and inspecting the log after a while. I've just enable the log and will report my findings after few reboots.
    – AndyDeGroo
    Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 6:19
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    So it's been almost two weeks since I enabled MSMQ trace logging. There are zero entries in the End2End event log. Based on that, I assume that MSMQ is not used at all and it's a good candidate for removal. Still the question remains: Why is MSMQ installed on Windows 10 systems by default?
    – AndyDeGroo
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 0:57
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    @Frostalf It's not really a problem but a question I could not find answer to in any Microsoft resource. Thank for pointing out that. I had a suspicion that MSMQ might be needed for .NET. It appears to be installed just in case an application targeting .NET 4.6 needs it.
    – AndyDeGroo
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 18:40

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