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The guide also says you need to close Event Viewer before installing. I'm not sure I want to know why.

The login provider can emit event log entries which say who logged in and when, and reasons for login failure etc.

Those entries aren't plain text - they are protobufs decoded by a google-provided dll file. If event viewer is open, it won't load that dll, and it will fail to render any event log entries for logins until it is restarted.

Oh, that makes sense, thanks.

I didn’t even know you could write custom decoders for event viewer. Is that a thing people do?

A previous debugging hole I fell into once accidentally and barely managed to escape left me with the impression that every event has a "custom" decoder associated; there's no "built-in" event types from the Event Viewer's perspective. There are a handful of very common "custom decoders" that when they break it is an interesting world of madness. In the case of my debugging, one of the decoders installed by the .NET Framework (and used by almost all apps that use the main .NET Event Log libraries) broke and needed repair. It seems like there is a bunch of power in building custom decoders, but I never want to try debugging one again.

"You don't want to look at this, trust me"

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