Question: What is the difference between Automatic and Automatic (Delayed Start) for a property setting for a Windows service? i.e. what do I gain or lose by setting my service as one or the other?

Running the service on Windows Server 2008 x64

Answer: 
A service marked as **Automatic (Delayed Start)** will start shortly after all other services designated as **Automatic** have been started. In my experience, this means that they are started 1-2 minutes after the computer boots.

The setting is most useful in lessening the "mad rush" for resources when a machine boots.

Note that when you have 20 services all being started at the same time, each will start up slower as it competes with the others for slices of the machine's precious resources (CPU/RAM/Disk/Network). *That is, each service takes longer to become available!*

If you have a few services that are critical, then you may want to set those few to **Automatic** and set as many of the others as you can to **Automatic (Delayed Start)**. This will ensure that the critical services get the most resources early and become available sooner, while the non-critical services start a bit later (which by definition is ok).
This is also used when you want to delay the start of a service to allow other services to start completely, such as the SCCM Client, which does a delayed start to allow the WMI service to start fully as it is dependent on it being fully up and running.