Meteor_of_War
New member
I noticed this issue over the past week and did manage to figure it out and fix it, but thought I'd share here to see if anyone else ever experienced any similar problem, and just to document it for myself should it ever happen again.
So I noticed a game I had installed but had not played for well over a year would not launch when I finally decided to play it again (Mortal Kombat X). No error given from Steam, the game would just not launch when I clicked the play button in the Steam client. But when trying to launch directly from the game's .exe it gave the error "The Application Was Unable to Start Correctly 0xc000007b."
After doing some searching around turns out it was caused by corrupted .DLL files in the Windows > System32 folder. I used a program called Dependency Walker to identify the corrupt files, then replace them and this got the game working again. To replace I had to first delete the corrupt .DLLs from the System32 and SysWOW64 folders, then uninstall and reinstall ALL Visual C++ libraries (used a handy Visual C++ Runtime Installer (All-In-One) v56 from majorgeeks.com to reinstall).
However, after that I started checking other games and found that five others I had installed were also not launching. Using Dependency Walker again showed this time there were corrupt DirectX files. I first tried running the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer to reinstall DirectX, but it did not correct the problem. I had to Google around for a while and eventually found someone that had a similar problem and they created a WinRAR with all the necessary DirectX files to just copy into the System32 folder, and voila all the games started launching again.
I knew it was risky to use those files from an unknown source but at that point I had already tried all kinds of suggested fixes with no luck - reinstalling the games, updating .NET framework, running commands like chkdsk, SFC scan, etc. and was about to just reinstall Windows anyways.
After a couple days now I can report everything seems to still be working fine. At least for the games I currently have installed. Probably going to do a clean wipe and reinstall of Windows soon anyways when I have a free afternoon because I assume some issues are still lurking on this Windows install. Not sure how it happened though, all I can think is there was a rogue AMD storage driver update that was supposed to have been pulled from the main Windows update but got through and nearly bricked my PC few weeks back. Maybe some things got corrupted then, but don't really know.
From what I've read the most common cause of this error is trying to load a 64 bit DLL into a 32 bit process, or vice versa, and Dependency Walker seems to be the best method to identify the culprit .DLL files. But like I said I have no clue why this started happening.
So I noticed a game I had installed but had not played for well over a year would not launch when I finally decided to play it again (Mortal Kombat X). No error given from Steam, the game would just not launch when I clicked the play button in the Steam client. But when trying to launch directly from the game's .exe it gave the error "The Application Was Unable to Start Correctly 0xc000007b."
After doing some searching around turns out it was caused by corrupted .DLL files in the Windows > System32 folder. I used a program called Dependency Walker to identify the corrupt files, then replace them and this got the game working again. To replace I had to first delete the corrupt .DLLs from the System32 and SysWOW64 folders, then uninstall and reinstall ALL Visual C++ libraries (used a handy Visual C++ Runtime Installer (All-In-One) v56 from majorgeeks.com to reinstall).
However, after that I started checking other games and found that five others I had installed were also not launching. Using Dependency Walker again showed this time there were corrupt DirectX files. I first tried running the DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer to reinstall DirectX, but it did not correct the problem. I had to Google around for a while and eventually found someone that had a similar problem and they created a WinRAR with all the necessary DirectX files to just copy into the System32 folder, and voila all the games started launching again.
I knew it was risky to use those files from an unknown source but at that point I had already tried all kinds of suggested fixes with no luck - reinstalling the games, updating .NET framework, running commands like chkdsk, SFC scan, etc. and was about to just reinstall Windows anyways.
After a couple days now I can report everything seems to still be working fine. At least for the games I currently have installed. Probably going to do a clean wipe and reinstall of Windows soon anyways when I have a free afternoon because I assume some issues are still lurking on this Windows install. Not sure how it happened though, all I can think is there was a rogue AMD storage driver update that was supposed to have been pulled from the main Windows update but got through and nearly bricked my PC few weeks back. Maybe some things got corrupted then, but don't really know.
From what I've read the most common cause of this error is trying to load a 64 bit DLL into a 32 bit process, or vice versa, and Dependency Walker seems to be the best method to identify the culprit .DLL files. But like I said I have no clue why this started happening.
