A recent issue had my digging through the registry to find a Event Log Channel that had become corrupt/missing since an in-place server upgrade.

In this case the issue was causing Server Manager to seize up and refuse to refresh the local server because it couldn’t read all the event logs. Event logs in Microsoft-Windows-ServerManager-ManagementProvider/Operational mentioned BPA results and scans, however this wasn’t the root cause. It was an invalid/outdated Windows Event Log Channel.

There were a few mentions of “Failed to query the results of bpa xpath: Microsoft/Windows/WebServer:$reports$\$latestreport$\Discovery.xml:$creationtime$. error: The system cannot find the file specified., last error: The system cannot find the path specified...” but this perhaps was a red herring.

To find the Event Viewer channel that was causing issues, running the following command in an elevated PowerShell prompt worked:

Get-WinEvent -ListLog *

Resulted in:

Get-WinEvent : Could not retrieve information about the Microsoft-Windows-Store/Operational log. Error: The system cannot find the file specified.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-WinEvent -ListLog * -ComputerName DEV1 -Verbose
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-WinEvent], Exception
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : LogInfoUnavailable,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetWinEventCommand

Backing up and removing this channel from the registry resolved it:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT\Channels\<Erroring Channel Name>

A quick Restart-Service eventlog -Force and we were fixed.