Event log service is unavailable issue

I thought I’d blog about this issue I had, since it was in the end so easy to solve, but I had a hard time finding a good description of both my specific problem and any resolution. I am a bit ashamed to say that I got quite creative before trying this.

The problem I was having was that when opening the Event Viewer on my Windows Server 2008 I’d got a message saying that “The Event Log service is unavailable. Verify the service is running.“. And if I went to look it was in fact not running. The thing is though that I could easily start it, and it would keep running, until I went to the Event Viewer to look at the logs, which would then bring it down.

I solved this by simply deleting all the files in the C:WindowsSystem32winevtLogs folder.

Update 2010-02-22: Feedback in comments suggest that you might need to restart after performing this step.  

I’m not going to patent the solution, or make the claim that it will work in every case, but it did for me, and if you are experiencing this problem it’s easy enough to try.