The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!
Ran into a case today where each time we tried to start sidebar.exe it would fail silently. No crash to investigate, no error, so where to next?
First I set an IFEO for sidebar.exe to launch windbg.exe when started, by doing this it stops at the initial breakpoint.
Secondly I enabled loader snaps to show me more information on module loads: c:\debuggers\gflags.exe -i sidebar.exe +sls.
The show loader snaps flag captures detailed information about the loading and unloading of executable images and their supporting library modules and displays the data in the debugger.
After doing this and g'ing the debugger we could see that right before the process terminated it failed to load one particular dll:
LDR: LdrLoadDll, loading C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter\atl.dll from C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter;C:\Windows\system32
LDR: LdrpSearchPath - Looking for C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter\atl.dll in C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter;C:\Windows\system32
LDR: LdrpSearchPath - Unable to locate C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter\atl.dll in C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter;C:\Windows\system32: 0xc0000135
LDR: LdrpCheckForLoadedDll - Unable To Locate C:\Program Files\AVOne\AVOne 3GP Video Converter\atl.dll: 0xc0000135
Looking up the error code with err.exe:
C:\Debuggers\x86_ver>err 0xc0000135
# for hex 0xc0000135 / decimal -1073741515
STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND
# {Unable To Locate Component}
# This application has failed to start because %hs was not
# found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.
# 1 matches found for "0xc0000135"
Once I had the user install the missing application (AVOne 3GP Video Converter) everything worked as expected.
