dmo's questions

On two separate Windows 8.1 installations with Visual Studio 2013 installed, the event log service errors on any attempt to read from/write to it.

When I open Event Viewer I get this message when viewing any log:

Event Viewer cannot open the event log or custom view. Verify that Event Log service is running or query is too long. The request is not supported (50)

The Windows Event Log service is running.

If I try to write to the event log programmatically, I get a Win32Exception with NativeErrorCode 50/HResult -2147467259 "The request is not supported".

If I navigate to C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs, I can open the .evtx files using the local Event Viewer and they appear fine (except for having no events since mid-May 2014).

Any ideas how to repair this?

I going to be creating several Hyper-V virtual machines that are virtually identical (and all running on the same hardware). In the past I've done this by building a single VM, patching & installing software, then running sysprep and using the sysprepped VHD as the basis for Hyper-V differencing disks.

This has worked fine, but I thought I could get extra performance by putting the base (sysprepped) VHD on an SSD. However, I noticed that just booting and going through the out-of-box experience caused the differencing disk to grow to several GB. So I'd like to construct a sysprep answer file to minimize the changes that the sysprep process will make. So far I've found that setting the PersistAllDeviceInstalls and DoNotCleanUpNonPresentDevices options reduce the differencing VHD size to ~1.5 GB after boot.

Does anyone have suggestions about how to minimize the differences after sysprep (or on a running machine)?

I'd like to install FreeBSD 8.0 in a Hyper-V VM but I get a kernel panic whenever I try to boot the install ISO. I've tried both i386 and amd64; with and without APIC enabled; with and without processor features disabled in Hyper-V. Is it necessary to use the procedure in the Handbook for Xen domU?

Does anyone has experience with this configuration?

We have a Server 2008 Core install whose requirements have changed - is it possible to install the GUI components in place, or is a reinstall necessary?

I need to give a TFS Project Group contributor privileges to a Source Control subdirectory in a TFS project. I can connect successfully as someone from this group but can't browse Source Control, presumably because the user doesn't have access to the top level of the project. Is there any way to configure access in a manner that doesn't require giving read access to the whole project or maintaining privileges for every folder that shares a directory with folders in the path to the target subdirectory?

Clarification:

Project / Folder1 / Folder2 / TargetFolder

I have set this up by giving them permissions, but to restrict permissions to only TargetFolder and its contents, I need to give the group read access to Folder1 and Folder2. But because the permissions are inherited, I need to deny this group on every other folder under Project, Folder1, and Folder2. This is a maintenance headache and if new directories are added in the future, they will need to have their permissions changed as well.