Reading Event Log Using .NET?

I've created an Event Log Source for my application name during the installation process (the end-users are not local admins) and the app writes any error messages to the Application event log.I now want to retrieve the error from the Application log and display them in a grid in my app.

The issue is that it takes more than 30 seconds to retrieve all of the entries,regardless of any filtering I perform in my WMI query. My query is:

"SELECT * FROM Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'Application' And Sourcename = 'myApp' And TimeGenerated > '" + DateTime.Now.AddDays(-14).ToString("yyyyMMdd") + "'"

Initially I only filtered on the SourceName but it took 30+ seconds to retrieve about 100 records from 40,000 in the Application log. I added the TimeGenerated filter thinking it would reduce the query time but it was the same.

I tried using the ReturnImmediately enumerationoption property, which does return quickly, but when iterating through the collection it takes over 30 seconds to display the relevant entries.The benchmark I am working against is the speed at which the Windows Event Viewer opens the Application Log and applies a filter on the SourceName. This takes at most 5 seconds to redisplay the filtered list. However, I note that working on Vista, when I open Event Viewer, UAC prompts for admin elevation whereas my code will be reading from the Application log using standard user rights.