The Application Failed to Initialize Properly (0xc0000022) – Application Error

I got a report about some problems on one of our Windows 2003 servers. It started last Friday and people got this error message when they tried to run some applications: The Application Failed to Initialize Properly (0xc0000022). This error only applied to regular users; administrators did not have problems with this error.

A quick Google search found this article. I thought that this would fix the problem, but it did not. I still got the same error message after I ran the commands to fix the DLL and OCX files in the Windows system32 directory.

I then used Process Monitor to monitor file access while I tried to run the problematic application. Process Monitor showed that there were access denial problems when the application tried to call some DLLs in the application directory. I checked the offending DLLs and found that they did not have read and execute permissions set for regular users. After I modified the permissions to give regular users read and execute permissions to those DLLs, the problem was fixed. Here is a screenshot of the permissions of the application’s DLLs directory. Make sure the users have the highlighted permissions.