Event Log service broken on Windows 8.1 dev machines

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?

Really old question, but I believe the answer still applies under Windows 10. The credit for this answer goes to the comment made by Olaf Hess above, but it's absolutely correct:

Remove the registry key called HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MiniNT.

Apparently the presence of this key causes all kinds of issues for the Event Log viewer, as well as Windows Update, and possibly other things, because it makes the system believe that you're running the Windows Preinstallation Environment. See this blog post: https://www.quppa.net/blog/2016/04/14/beware-of-the-minint-registry-key/