Well, I found the problem, so I will post it if someone else runs into the same problem. All of this is related to permissions on our target machine, on which we are deploying. Although our development environment was “deployed” using the embedded web server through visual studio, our integration environment was the 2003 server (I hope you will see that I’m going to deal with this). Turns out this is a permission issue with the default application pool settings with iis. Running privs on the network does not allow you to access the event log and does not generate an error (note that this is a real pain). If you move it to your local system account ... everything will be fine (although this is not recommended). There is a section in the EntLib documentation for working under partial trust,where you can find most of the information you need.