Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service service.

Ok, here is what happened to me and it may prove helpful to some of you. My home theater PC developed the same issue on 12/31 (lets just call it Forced_Classic here). I tried to restore it to the last known pre-update point which was 12/29 - Restore failed in the middle of restoring with a Blue Screen of Death (something that does not usually happen), so first I had to get the computer back up and running (did this with a repair disk and I tried restore again from the repair disk options, this time it failed again but much more gracefully, such that I could reboot and it was back up and running (yes still with the Forced_Classic issue)). 

So after reading all of this thread and a few other threads, I decided to try to find out what was going on - so I launched Device Manager first - just to see if there were any Yellow cautions and there were two - now this was from a previously perfectly good running machine so that told me something might have kept the drivers from loading, so then I launched Services to see if there were any services stuck in "Starting" mode - sure enough Windows presentation foundation font cache was stuck "Starting" so that told me that this might be the source of the issue (one of the other threads I followed was the one from Soluto below).

https://support.soluto.com/entries/20592296-windows-could-not-connect-to-the-system-event-notification-service-error

So this is what fixed it for me (renaming the corrupted Cache files) - but here is the thought thread for all of you experiencing this issue and the myriad of fixes and why some of the fixes work for others and some don't. Think of Windows and having to load 100 (or however many) Services and the also load associated drivers. Now most of the services/drivers are written well enough that if one gets interrupted, it is usually no big deal (or a lot closer to cause and effect), but in this case if something gets stuck in Services with "starting" then the rest of the services may or may not load, and thus render perfectly good dependent drivers as useless (and thus Windows could try a generic driver to get things running). Yes it seems like sometimes a new driver install will fix this, but that might be a case of the new install changing the load order of services such that it hides or delays the loading of something that may be corrupt.

So in order I would recommend:

1. launch Device Manager first just to see if there are any previously good Devices that have now been turned into Cautions
2. launch Services and see if there is anything stuck "Starting" - if there is then the rest of the services probably did not load.

Then it is up to you to try to determine what has caused the "stuck" condition - in this case Soluto had a great reply and that was one of the 4 things I was going to check out - Winsock, Event Logs, Cache Fonts, and Services.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Rick (Win7 64 Bit)

When in search box and type "Services", there is no option to click on called "RUN AS ADMIN".

My computer has been down for 2 weeks, and I cannot connect with Windows.