The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.

The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.

 

I wasted quite an amount of time figuring out the cause for above error on a newly created Windows 2008 Server core system(x86_64).

Finally found that, following was the cause of the problem:

        - The Application(EXE) needs a dll(say XYZ.dll).

        - On that machine, it was finding a 32-bit dll with same name. The directory where the 64-bit DLL was present was not added to the %PATH%.

        - Normally on most of the machines, it will not load the 32-bit dll and show the following standard error message(This application has failed to start because XYZ.dll was not found)

       




But, on that server core machine, instead of throwing this error message, it was throwing the most confusing Application Error message.

Cheers,

Santhosh