Restarting Windows services and v$transaction

I am sure you are thinking "come on, what do I care about restarting a Windows service" or "I thought this was an Oracle blog" right?  Just hang with me for a minute and it will all make sense!  While we are Oracle technologists foremost, sometimes we need to get additional skills to enhance our primary skills and this is a great example of that.  Today I found myself referencing documentation from Microsoft's Technet because we have a Windows service that keeps a connection open to our database so the software can call our database when needed, and this is keeping a transaction open.  Why is that a problem?  We need to make sure that nothing in v$transaction is older than x days due to our restoration plans, but every x days our monitoring tells us about the old transaction from the Windows service and we have to manually restart the service.  Well, HAD to after using the "net stop" and "net start" commands in a batch file so we can create a scheduled task that bounces this service every night.