Friday, August 21, 2009

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000034)

Well, the terrible Adobe Acrobat Reader partial install issue reared its ugly head for me again recently. Not sure how this happens, but during an automated upgrade, Acrobat Reader got into a state where every time I'd try to start it I would get "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000034)". Uninstall/Reinstall and the same issue occurs. At the recommendation of some web forum somewhere on another topic, I checked into Filemon, part of Sysinternals. I started this up, then tried to start Acrobat Reader. After it failed to start, I checked the log in Filemon and found that I was missing MSVCP80.DLL. Weird. Maybe it was that Visual Studio 2005 uninstall I had recently done... Anyhow, looking for this DLL brought me to dll-files.com. Normally I avoid non-MS sites to get files such as this one, but I downloaded it anyway and did a virus check on it. Seemed clean, so I was able to doubleclick on the event in Filemon to get to the location Acrobat Reader wanted the DLL and place it in there. This fixed the problem, thereby allowing Acrobat Reader to start. It immediately wanted to do another upgrade and even a repair I think. Now all seems well.