Symptoms

K2 connect Server appears to be stopped in K2 designer for visual studio. Attempting to start the server from visual studio will result in the following error message:

"K2 connect Server failed. Cannot open K2 connect Server service on computer '...'"
 

Diagnoses

The account being used to run K2 designer for visual studio does not have the necessary rights on the K2 server to manage the K2 Connect service.
 

Resolution

You will need to give the developer account the rights to restart K2Connect Service. The developer account will need permission to restart K2 Connect server, because as part of the deployment process the K2 Connect service need to be restarted to load the updated definition.

By default the local administrators security group in Windows has this permission, but if you want to give developers the right without adding them to the local administrators group, please use:
1) Group Policy, or
2) Security Template, or
3) Subinacl.exe.
Microsoft do come with detailed steps and explanation on how to achieve this. Kindly refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325349 for more details