Error 1053 : The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion error event.
By blurg64
Recently the Project Server 2007 queue at one of my customers stopped working. What made this stranger was that it occurred on the Production, Test and Development environments within days of each other. My first thoughts were to see if the customer’s IT department had made any changes to the environments, like a patch, or hosting configuration change, but after passing my polygraph tests it seems they hadn’t. 
Restarting the Queue Service didn’t seem to fix the issue, resulting in the error:
Error 1053 : The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion
After a quick search, I found this article from the excellent Information Worker Structured Collaboration blog covering this exact scenario. It seems that after a period of time, an error can occur in Virtualised environments which causes the Queue and/or Event services to not start. As outlined in the blog, the fix is pretty simple, requiring two simple registry changes and a reboot.
So if you run Project Server 2007 in a virtualised environment, bookmark the above site as it’s likely to save your bacon.