English, please!

To say that some event log messages descriptions are cryptic is an understatement. We at www.eventid.net have decided to start adding plain English "translation" for some of these messages. This information is only available through an EventID.Net Subscription, a modest price for the work done by our consultants. 

This could also be a way to describe the problem to your manager! Tip: First just mention the actual description and if you get a blank stare, wait a couple of seconds and then say "Ok, what this actually means is...." and gave the plain English version.

Here are some examples:

Event ID 333:

Description	An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed unrecoverably. The Registry could not read in or write out or flush one of the files that contain the system's image of the Registry.
English, please	I tried to read or write in the system registry but I got a problem. As far as I can tell, the registry is locked and there are problems saving the files that contain them to the hard disk.

Event ID 10004:

Description

DCOM got error <error description> and was unable to logon .\IWAM_CORPDOM in order to run the server: {<component GUID>}

English, please

I tried to run an application that is using DCOM (a technology that enables me to run part of the application on another computer and me just to get the results). Since this type of application requires me to logon, I tried to do that using the \IWAM... account but the DCOM application rejected me. Maybe this account doesn't have the right to execute that application or there may be other problems - see the <error description>. If you want to identify the application that I tried to run, lookup the GUID in the registry.

* * *

English translation is "not applicable"

Some event id / source combinations have a large variety of the actual event description. Basically the programmers of that application had the application record just one event id and fill-up the description with whatever message they want to be recorded in that situation. To add an "English translation" for this type of events it's useless - it would be just a statement similar to: "I encountered an error, see the event description for details".
One example is event id 17055 from MSSQLServer source. Basically the event description has a template like this: error code: error description. Regardless of the error code/description combination they use the same event id and source. For such cases you will see the "English, please" field as "Not applicable". When possible we will create a different record for each instance of that event id / source combination.