Failed to connect to a windows service.

That should be set to automatic. You will need to go to the Start menu and simply "services" on the search line at the bottom to see that listed at the top of the listing that appears. When clicking on the link for it a new window will appear displaying all services.

Scroll down to the system event notification item and see if that is set to automatic there. Refer to the attached image and note the action on the menu bar for starting up or turning off a service when highlighted. If you find it set to manual or off completely click the start or restart option depending on how it is set.

That's one service you want set to automatic. For disabling certain types of notifications you simply go into the Action center to selectively choose to set things there to notifications only or hide all notifications when a program also places an icon in the system notification area(system tray).

You should try clicking on the restart while having that highlighted. You may have to restart the system however once you get it started up again. You can try switching back and forth to manual and then onto automatic in order to give it a jump start to see if that will work.

It wouldn't prevent normal activities since it only presents notices but is quite useful when alerting you to potential problems! This is why you still want to see it running.

Have you restarted the system inbetween setting changes? The idea would be to try and kick start the service by forcing Windows to perform the actual restart.

Another idea is noting when this was first seen and simply rolling the system registry back before it was noticed with a system restore point since you may have a registry error of some type keeping it from running. Review anything new like any recent updates installed in case one went on bad.

This has been hounding you that long? I wouldn't even waste the time trying a fast fix but have performed an upgrade to repair or full clean install if no system image had been created to resolve it.

The present problem of not being able to jump start it suggests a corruption in the registry that's been ongoing. One of those methods may just be what you need to solve it unless another solution is found. Offhand however I would advise backing things up in case you need a fresh start.

In that comes about and once everything is back and working make a good system image if you have a second drive to work with(even external). The fast solution may work for this but could see other problems emerge later if the registry did suffer a pounding or you initially had a bad install of Windows.

On a new build to upgrade someone else here I made sure to add in a second larger storage drive for everything including a pair of 1)clean install image 2)frequent updated to be overwritten image along with the long term storage of files. In fact that just saw a blue screen when going for the long list of updates with even the clean install.

You can still run Windows normally but will continue to suffer especially if something else comes up and there's no notification seen. That could even be a hardware problem leading to something worse if not seen to. This is why the notification service can still play a vital role at times and needs to be running.