Visual Studio – “The application was unable to start correctly”

runtime-errorvisual c++visual studio 2010

When I try to run my Visual C++ application, a box comes up saying "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)." The only output is

Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file
Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\kernel32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file
Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\KernelBase.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file

But all of those files exist…which makes me think that its not the cause of the application's error. With no other output, I don't know what could be wrong. If anyone knows what I could check for or how to fix it, I would be grateful.

Best Answer

Few blueprints:

  1. Rebuild the application, including all dependent DLLs, and try again.
  2. Ensure all dependent DLLs, services (like MSMQ) are available and running.
  3. Check if one of your DLLs DllMain is returing failure, which causes the application to start. OS won't start, if any of DLL returns failure while initializing.
  4. Ensure you have correct CRT/MFC versions for the Debug/Release DLL you are using, or have linked other DLLs/EXE with.
  5. Use Dependency Walker to find out of any DLL is missing, not found, or of different platform.
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