Google chrome: The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005)

Google chrome’s “application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005)” error have some temporary fixes.Google chrome (chrome.exe) did not work for me initially, and I got the Google chrome error:

“The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005).Click on OK to terminate the application.”

I was disappointed and doing a search revealed that several people were reporting the same problem on various windows platforms including windows vista (SP1, ultimate), windows XP3 or windows XP2.So the error seem to have been triggered in different versions of windows vista and windows XP platforms and it is not specific to any one of them.Also, the bug was reportedly caused by “Symantec Endpoint Protection“, though in my case, I was not using any symantec product.

If you faced “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005).Click on OK to terminate the application.” error with google chrome (chrome.exe) and you are using symantec, then you could try the following steps:

• Back up the registry on an affected system
• Open the registry on the Agent system by entering regedit from a run prompt
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysPlant
• Open the Start DWORD
• Change the value to 4 to disable the drivers
• Reboot the system to commit the changes

The above registry solution to fix the Google chrome error was issued in symantec forums.Read it here.

The other easier solution is to run Google Chrome with --no-sandbox (with two dashes before “no”). To run it with the above option, edit the property of the shortcut you use to launch Google chrome and add the above option at the end of the “target” line (after the path to the chrome exe) i.e. Right click your shortcut to “Google Chrome” and click Properties. In the target text field, add a space then add --no-sandbox (with two dashes before “no”) right after the ending quotation mark. Run using this shortcut.However make sure that there is a space in between the ending quotation mark and the --no-sandbox option that you add.You could find a shortcut to google chrome on your desktop.Also note that you should use two dashes before “no”.See the pic. below.

You are in effect loosing the sandbox effect of Google Chrome.

What is sandboxing in Google chrome?

Sandboxing is a special feature in Google chrome, to prevent malware from installing itself onto computer/PC.It also prevents what happens in one tab from affecting the other tabs i.e each tab runs as a seperate process and for each of these processes, all the rights have been stripped.

Hence, each of these processes are isolated and the websites/web applications you run via these processes can compute but they cannot write files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas like your documents or desktop.
From the above, it is clear that sandboxing has lots of goodness and one would not like to loose this feature of google chrome. However note that sandboxing is only an additional security feature in google.