I started receiving the error The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022) on my primary development machine (running Windows XP SP3) whenever I tried to launch select applications (cmd.exe, SecureCRT, runas.exe, mmc.exe, etc).  It had been a while since my last reboot and I had installed a some new programs and the latest Windows Updates, so I assumed it was related to that.

One reboot later and some applications (cmd.exe) would launch, but many others still wouldn't.  A quick Google search showed that this was often related to the permissions being incorrect on some core system DLLs.  No problem, find the DLLs, right click, properties.  And the Security tab was missing.  The most common cause of this is that Simple File Sharing is enabled.  Except it wasn't. I toggled that off/on, and still the Security tab was missing.  Enter CACLS – a command line utility to view/edit file ACLs.

Fixing Windows DLL Permissions

Windows is trying to load a DLL that the application depends on, and something is preventing it.  Given that the Security tab was missing from an Explorer Properties window, my guess would be that a DLL that controls ACLs and permissions had restrictive or corrupted permissions.

The CACLS commands below modify all .dll and .ocx files inside the system32 directory and grant members of the Users group Read access.

• As an Administrator open a command prompt – Start > Run > cmd
• Inside the command prompt window type:
  CACLS %systemroot%\System32\*.dll /E /G BUILTIN\Users:R
  And press Enter.  This will take a minute or so and will display a slew of processed file: C:\WINDOWS\System32\blah.dll messages.
• Then type:
  CACLS %systemroot%\System32\*.ocx /E /G BUILTIN\Users:R
  And press Enter.

After both commands completed I was immediately able to launch all of the previously non-functional applications.

Application DLL Dependencies

Here are the top-level dependencies for some of the applications that were not working properly.

The reason I chose to modify all of the DLLs was pure laziness – SecureCRT has 135 DLLs it depends on, VMware Workstation has 157, cmd.exe has 130.  If you are aiming for precision use the excellent Dependency Walker and load each application.  Copy the DLLs with full paths, remove anything outside of %systemroot%\system32 and then find the common shared DLLs from list.  Use the same CACLS command (CACLS %systemroot%\System32\FILENAME /E /G BUILTIN\Users:R) for each of those files.