Dateiliste

For almost 3 weeks I kept getting this error message when starting some applications on my Windows 8 computer:

The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application.

This wasn't a big deal as the majority of programs worked fine. However, one application that didn't work had bothered me quite a lot. I was not able to run my D3Server3 anymore.

The machine is the one I had been using to work on D3Server3 for at least 6 months. Now, all of a sudden, the final builds would not run. Strange enough, whenever I copied the software to another computer it ran just fine. The same, by the way, applied to the software's installation program. It would simply not run with the above mentioned error.

Of course I tried to examine the executable files with Dependency Walker and found that there's at least one DLL (dynamic link library) missing (IEShims.dll). I wasn't aware until then that D3Server3 required this DLL at all, and I'm now pretty sure it doesn't. Dependency Walker also reported some more quite funny and strange issues and errors at the same time for other applications that wouldn't start with the same error message.

For example, the software sometimes reported missing export functions in DLLs that actually existed, and so on. I really had no clue what happened.

I concentrated on this IEShims.dll, as that was the one consistently reported for D3Server3. However, even when the DLL was provided, and even when Dependency Walker was happy with the file, the software would still not want to start, and only the error message popped up.

Another thing was that, whenever one of the affected applications displayed the error message once, its executable file was locked by the system. In other words, after for example starting the debug version of D3Server3 once, I could not build the software again because the output file (D3Server3.exe) had been locked. But then, this was exactly what gave me the final hint.

I disabled the virus scanner (AVAST) and my system and D3Server3 lived happily ever after.

Oh, well, so much to professional virus protection.

It turned out that Avast silently blocked the execution of every file that had been updated recently. The software obviously failed to block it entirely, hence the error message.