We're having disk space issues on a server running 2008 R2 and I've noticed that the event logs are auto-archiving. I've copied the archive files to another drive but now cannot get the archives to delete out of the \winevt\logs folder as they appear to be locked by running processes. How do I unlock the older archives (that shouldn't be getting written to currently) in order to delete them from the C: drive and clear the space?

I was afraid of that. Unfortunately there are several other services on that server that are dependent on the Event Log service (discovered this when I tried to stop that service previously). We will probably schedule this as an after-hours maintenance task. Thanks for the quick reply!