I knew there were more reasons I didn't like Windows...

Hm. Did it ever strike you that maybe if you tried to use Windows as Windows, rather that as some *nix substitute, you might get on better?

The windows event log apis are designed to log significant events to the systems event logs, regardless of the application that generated them. They are not designed as a general purpose logging api. It's done that way that the user has one place to go to look for critical events, rather than having to plunder their entire file system looking for where some application might have stuck its log file.

If you're looking for a general purpose application logging mechanism, use one of those on CPAN in the LOG::* namespace that writes a standard flats ascii file rather than Windows proprietary binary format.