I was having a problem viewing the event logs on my windows 2003 domain controller. The specific error message was “”Unable to complete the operation on ‘Application’. Access is denied”". This was very strange because I logged in as Administrator and should be able to access everything. The solution to this was quite simple, although I don’t know how this happened in the first place. The Administrator cannot be part of either Domain Guests or Guest accounts. The security policies are applied in a very peculiar order and diminish the privileges of the Administrator.