Askitd is a simple windows-nt service. I can be start from the services console or the command prompt with the command: net start askitd and stopped with net stop askitd. If the services shuts down immediately check the windows event viewer for recent entries of Askitd. If you don't find anything there should be a file on your C:\ drive called C:\askitdi_error.txt. This will contain the last exception thrown by the service before it failed.
likely causes of failure of that nature are not having the newline and the bottom of config.ini and shefcodes.txt.

various warnings, info messages, and errors get logged to the event log.
NOTE: it's not perfect, you may see a lot of network connection errors, this due to the why that system was designed to fail. Anything remotely wacky and it bails.