I think it does nothing. It's in the pywin32 service examples and has been for a good 10 years, but as far as I can tell, no such event is used by the library internally. win32event.SetEvent is supposed to get one thread (in win32event.CreateEvent(None,0,0,None) the first zero means the event will auto-reset as soon as a thread stops waiting, so it's really one thread) waiting for that event to continue, but unless I'm missing something with how services work, nothing ever waits for that event to be fired, so it won't do anything.

Same goes for socket.setdefaulttimeout(60), really, I think someone just forgot to remove it at one point before posting to stackoverflow, and with everyone building on top of what everyone else without, nobody knows why it's there anymore and nobody has ever dared to check. You can just remove the whole __init__ function.

EDIT: See the example from this question

import win32serviceutil 
import win32service 
import win32event

class SmallestPythonService(win32serviceutil.ServiceFramework):
    _svc_name_ = "SmallestPythonService"
    _svc_display_name_ = "display service"

    def __init__(self, args):
        win32serviceutil.ServiceFramework.__init__(self, args)
        self.hWaitStop = win32event.CreateEvent(None, 0, 0, None)

    def SvcStop(self):
        self.ReportServiceStatus(win32service.SERVICE_STOP_PENDING)
        win32event.SetEvent(self.hWaitStop)

    def SvcDoRun(self):
        win32event.WaitForSingleObject(self.hWaitStop, win32event.INFINITE)

if __name__=='__main__':
    win32serviceutil.HandleCommandLine(SmallestPythonService)

Seems like it's usually meant so you can have an example service that runs until it's stopped.

You should install pywin32 package (not pypiwin32)!!!

you can find plenty of demos related to the winapi in your C:\PythonXX\Lib\site-packages\win32\Demos folder. In this folder you'll find a script named eventLogDemo.py. There you can see how to use win32evtlog module. Just start this script with eventLogDemo.py -v and you will get prints from your Windows event log with logtype Application.

In case you can't find this script:

import win32evtlog
import win32api
import win32con
import win32security # To translate NT Sids to account names.

import win32evtlogutil

def ReadLog(computer, logType="Application", dumpEachRecord = 0):
    # read the entire log back.
    h=win32evtlog.OpenEventLog(computer, logType)
    numRecords = win32evtlog.GetNumberOfEventLogRecords(h)
#       print "There are %d records" % numRecords

    num=0
    while 1:
        objects = win32evtlog.ReadEventLog(h, win32evtlog.EVENTLOG_BACKWARDS_READ|win32evtlog.EVENTLOG_SEQUENTIAL_READ, 0)
        if not objects:
            break
        for object in objects:
            # get it for testing purposes, but dont print it.
            msg = win32evtlogutil.SafeFormatMessage(object, logType)
            if object.Sid is not None:
                try:
                    domain, user, typ = win32security.LookupAccountSid(computer, object.Sid)
                    sidDesc = "%s/%s" % (domain, user)
                except win32security.error:
                    sidDesc = str(object.Sid)
                user_desc = "Event associated with user %s" % (sidDesc,)
            else:
                user_desc = None
            if dumpEachRecord:
                print "Event record from %r generated at %s" % (object.SourceName, object.TimeGenerated.Format())
                if user_desc:
                    print user_desc
                try:
                    print msg
                except UnicodeError:
                    print "(unicode error printing message: repr() follows...)"
                    print repr(msg)

        num = num + len(objects)

    if numRecords == num:
        print "Successfully read all", numRecords, "records"
    else:
        print "Couldn't get all records - reported %d, but found %d" % (numRecords, num)
        print "(Note that some other app may have written records while we were running!)"
    win32evtlog.CloseEventLog(h)

def usage():
    print "Writes an event to the event log."
    print "-w : Dont write any test records."
    print "-r : Dont read the event log"
    print "-c : computerName : Process the log on the specified computer"
    print "-v : Verbose"
    print "-t : LogType - Use the specified log - default = 'Application'"


def test():
    # check if running on Windows NT, if not, display notice and terminate
    if win32api.GetVersion() & 0x80000000:
        print "This sample only runs on NT"
        return

    import sys, getopt
    opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "rwh?c:t:v")
    computer = None
    do_read = do_write = 1

    logType = "Application"
    verbose = 0

    if len(args)>0:
        print "Invalid args"
        usage()
        return 1
    for opt, val in opts:
        if opt == '-t':
            logType = val
        if opt == '-c':
            computer = val
        if opt in ['-h', '-?']:
            usage()
            return
        if opt=='-r':
            do_read = 0
        if opt=='-w':
            do_write = 0
        if opt=='-v':
            verbose = verbose + 1
    if do_write:
        ph=win32api.GetCurrentProcess()
        th = win32security.OpenProcessToken(ph,win32con.TOKEN_READ)
        my_sid = win32security.GetTokenInformation(th,win32security.TokenUser)[0]

        win32evtlogutil.ReportEvent(logType, 2,
            strings=["The message text for event 2","Another insert"],
            data = "Raw\0Data".encode("ascii"), sid = my_sid)
        win32evtlogutil.ReportEvent(logType, 1, eventType=win32evtlog.EVENTLOG_WARNING_TYPE,
            strings=["A warning","An even more dire warning"],
            data = "Raw\0Data".encode("ascii"), sid = my_sid)
        win32evtlogutil.ReportEvent(logType, 1, eventType=win32evtlog.EVENTLOG_INFORMATION_TYPE,
            strings=["An info","Too much info"],
            data = "Raw\0Data".encode("ascii"), sid = my_sid)
        print("Successfully wrote 3 records to the log")

    if do_read:
        ReadLog(computer, logType, verbose > 0)

if __name__=='__main__':
    test()

I hope this script fits your needs