That would actually be my preference TBH. Failing quickly at startup is usually far better than unpredictable behaviour later on, particularly if it's a long-running service. Though I've always thought that the behaviour of tools when launched interactively by the user, vs launched via an automated background process should probably be different - it may well be that if a user/administrator isn't aware it failed on machine startup the consequences of it not being running at all are worse than an ambiguous configuration setting.