I don’t tend to write much about Windows because it’s usefulness to me is limited to functioning as a Steam boot loader, and even that usefulness is somewhat diminished with Steam and an increasing number of games being available for Linux. Unfortunately, I recently had to do some testing that needed to be carried out using a Windows application, and I noticed that Chrome reported the above error when attempting to update itself.

The Chrome installer crash with the opaque 0xc0000005 error code on XP64 (Chrome is still supported on XP, even though MS is treating XP as EOL). Googling the problem suggested disabling the sandbox might help, but this isn’t really applicable since the problem occurs with the installer, not once Chrome is running (it runs just fine, it’s updating it that triggers the error).

A quick look at the crash dump revealed that one of the libraries dynamically linked at crash time was the MS Application Verifier, used for debugging programs and sending them fake information on what version of Windows they are running on. Uninstalling the MS Application Verifier cured the problem.