Still can't get the service to run under fully patched up windows 2012 R2 server VM. I even watched the service try to start with sysinternals process monitor and I can't understand why it just gives up at one point... all of a sudden there are a bunch of out of bounds errors then it hits wer.exe We all know what that is... Windows Error Reporting... ugh!
Our hopefully temporary plan is to use the free WUG syslog server (which works btw) until we can figure this out.