Round 2 - "The Application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005)"

[Chris O]

I posted about six months ago this thread which referred to the above error message. That thread was ended with me thinking I'd solved the problem, but I didn't. 

 

The problem boils down to one or two outcomes:

 

1) (Most common) For long stretches of time, I simply cannot start 7DtD. During the load screen, I'll get a pop-up error message (see image) which indicates the application can't start. Trying again, even after a computer reboot, and even after uninstalling and reinstalling the program, does nothing to fix the issue. 

 

 

2) The game is able to load, but at some point simply freezes, sometimes to the point that the computer restarts on its own (maybe, but not always, with the "blue screen of death"), or sometimes with other windows opening and continuing to function. Occasionally after this, I can successfully restart the game, but often not. 

 

My system specs should be more than capable of handling 7DtD (see image), and I even increased my RAM from 16GB to 32GB thinking that maybe this was the issue, but nothing changed.  As stated above, rebooting the computer doesn't solve anything, nor does uninstalling and reinstalling. I'm out of ideas. 

 

 

On occasion, seemingly at random, the game will load fine and I can play it... until I can't (when it freezes). Then it goes back to long periods where I can't even load it. 

 

At one point I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Easy Anti-Cheat thinking that maybe that was conflicting with my anti-virus (Trend Micro), but that caused the program to not load at all, which forced me to reinstall the whole thing. 

 

Anyway, Help! I do love playing this game, quirks and all, so it's very frustrating to essentially not be able to. I'm honestly at the point where I'd love to talk to a human being at Fun Pimps about how to fix this. 

 

Thanks for any more ideas you can come up with. 

[Beelzybub]

Uninstall any Asus sofware.

And, add two folder exceptions in Trend Micro for the game folder and the save folder.

[Chris O]

2 minutes ago, Beelzybub said:

Uninstall any Asus sofware.

 

That's the make of my Mobo as well as my GPU, so that doesn't seem like such a straight forward thing. 

 

Is this a known problem? 

[Beelzybub]

42 minutes ago, Chris O said:

Is this a known problem?

Yes. Gamefirst has been demonstrated to interfere with 7 Days to Die.

Edited December 12, 2022 by Beelzybub (see edit history)

[SylenThunder]

There is another Asus tool that causes issues as well. RamCache. 

 

Most of the software is just bloatware anyway. I have a number of Asus systems. They run just fine without any of the crap installed.

Get your GPU driver from the actual manufacturer. That would be Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Not Asus.

Motherboard and CPU chipset drivers come from Asus and Intel. You only need the driver. Not any software.

[Star69]

Another thing to try is to check for corrupted system files. Run the command prompt as administrator and type: sfc /scannow and then hit enter. It will check for bad files and try to fix them. If that comes back clean, run Windows Memory Diagnostics to be sure that you don’t have a faulty ram stick. 7 Days really taxes the ram and can uncover a bad stick where other programs run just fine. Do these 2 things as well as what was recommended before and hopefully you’ll fix your issue.

[Chris O]

Interesting, and thank you for the feedback above. 

 

In fiddling around with my computer and checking the settings, I noted that "hardware accelerated gpu scheduling" was turned off. I'd never heard of this feature before, so I quickly read up on it and opted to try playing the game while it's set to "On". So far, the game has been running well, with no crashes. 

 

Could it be this simple? 

[Star69]

For your sake, I sure hope so. I'm not familiar with that setting though but go with it and see if you can play regularly again.

[Jugginator]

21 hours ago, SylenThunder said:

RamCache. 

I don't even want to know what ram cache is. 

 

But, @Chris O, that error is pretty specific although there could be one of dozens of causes: something is blocking access to core files (game or system, system being modules required by the program) or general corruption (loaded modules getting corrupted in ram). So, could be bad ram, but I'm more leaning towards some software/antivirus/drivers/OS corruption.

[Jugginator]

Actually, @Chris O, you can do a decent test and go into services.msc (the services app), sort the tab by Startup Type then look through and start disabling the ones that aren't Windows processes. You'll also want to disable any third-party antivirus programs besides Windows Defender -- if you don't crash, you'll know it was one of the one(s) you prevented from starting up. To stop them: right click, go to Properties, click Stop at the middle-bottom area, then change the startup type to either Manual or Disabled (Disabled to be sure) and reboot the pc and try again.

[Chris O]

Update: I've been running my game successfully since Monday, playing probably 15 hours since then with no problems (except one time when Steam apparently crashed causing the game to crash, but I was able to log back in immediately and play "offline")... until this morning when Windows imposed an update on me. 

 

The moment after the computer restarted following the update, I got the very same error message again when I tried to relaunch the game.  

 

Again, so far the only change I've made since I initially posted was switching on the "hardware accelerated gpu scheduling". 

 

I'm going to start taking a look at removing/disabling the Asus software as recommended above. 

[SylenThunder]

Any semi-major Windows update may re-install the idiot GPU drivers that Microshaft pushes. First thing I do after these updates complete is do an extra restart, and then perform a clean install of GPU drivers.

[Chris O]

21 hours ago, SylenThunder said:

Any semi-major Windows update may re-install the idiot GPU drivers that Microshaft pushes. First thing I do after these updates complete is do an extra restart, and then perform a clean install of GPU drivers.

 

Interesting- in follow up to this post, I updated my NVIDIA GPU driver (didn't delete any drivers, just the one update, and no other changes) and then tried logging in, and was successful. Notably, the NVIDIA driver seemed to need an update as one was downloaded and installed; I didn't get the message that I was already running the latest driver, as I have since then. 

 

I was able to play for about one hour until I ran into a couple of bugs, causing the game to crash (the computer also restarted, but no blue screen). I was able to log back in after the first crash, play a little more, and then it crashed again, and this time wouldn't restart. (I can write more on these crashes because interesting things were happening in game, implying a problem was coming.) 

 

This seemingly implies that there's a GPU related problem, but perhaps more at work as well. 

Edited December 16, 2022 by Chris O (see edit history)

[SylenThunder]

Sounds like it might be a thermal or PSU issue. Make sure that Windows is not set to auto-restart on the BSOD, and you might catch it better. Or check the event log as it may be noted there.