2012R2 vss shadow has corrupt system hive

On 2012R2 with all updates as of Oct 9 2014, run the following commands:

vssadmin.exe create shadow /for=c:
mklink.exe /d c:\snap \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy1\
reg.exe load HKLM\snap c:\snap\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM

results in :

ERROR: An I/O operation initiated by the registry failed unrecoverably. The registry could not read in, or write out, or flush, one of the files that contain the system's image of the registry.

Is this expected behavior?

I have repeated this test with 2012R2 running as a VM on 3 hypervisors (ESXi, KVM, VirtualBox).