Today my kids told me that the Office software is not working. Here is the error message when they tried to run it. And somehow the problem only occurs to my Microsoft Office softwares: Power Point, Excel, Word (OneNote is not affected).
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But if I switch to my account, everything works fine. There are pages of internet posts that complained about the same error dated back to 2010 for Windows 7 (mine is Windows 8). They blame the cause to the anti-virus software. So I followed the advices to remove all my anti-virus software but the problem persist.

In the process, I also tried to upgrade to Windows 10 (it is a by product of trying to solve an issue, a good one). But it still doesn’t fix the problem.

After upgrade I switched to my account and found that I could use all the programs without any problem. While another Administrator account could not run it (same error message). But it works if I right click and then select “Run as administrator“. So it turned out to be an user access control problem again (AGAIN, Microsoft UAC sucks).

Solution 1: Run the application as administrator

So here is how you could fix the error message by running the application as administrator. If you don’t want to do the extra click, you could change the “Compatibility” property of the EXE files (Right click the EXE and select Property->Compatability). Select “Run this program as an administrator”, if you want the change to affect all users, select the “Change settings for all users” below. This solution works if all users have administrator account.

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However, for my case, I don’t want to give away my administrator password to the kids account, so I have to figure out exactly what is causing the access failure (as in Solution 2).

Solution 2: Fix the failed file accesses

To figure out which files are causing the problem.

Step 1: Run the Process Monitor software downloaded from Microsoft website

I found an useful tool from Microsoft: Process Monitor. It is a small program ready to run without installation.

After downloading the software, run the “Procmon.exe”. It will automatically logging all the processes and the file/registry operation it attempted to perform. It is good idea to “filter” the display such that only the interested process is displayed.

After some investigation, I quickly spotted 2 items that causing it failed.

  • PowerPoint and Excel failed to access “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\oart.dll
  • Winword.exe failed to access “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\wwlib.dll

You can locate them by doing a search for “Denied”.

Note that there are many other results such as “NAME NOT FOUND”, “FILE LOCKED WITH ONLY READERS” or “BUFFER OVERFLOW”. They seem suspicious at first glance, but they are not real problem. I know that for sure because I saved a log from my success run so that I could cross check the good and bad results.

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Step 2: Grant proper access privilege to users

Once you know which file to fix, the fix is relatively easy. Right click on the dll file and select “Security”. You might need to click “Advanced” to change it if you are in the problematic account.

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Since the Windows 10 started to use the outlook.com account to do the access control, the previous security setting with local administrator or users somehow doesn’t work any longer. So I tried to add the emails for all my users (granted read and execute privilege).

After doing that, the software started working again!

Hope it also solve your problem. Let us know if worked for you.

How to Fix “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000022)” Error
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18 thoughts on “How to Fix “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000022)” Error

  • August 24, 2016 at 2:49 pm
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    in my case its a whole folder how do i grant access

    Reply
    • August 27, 2016 at 10:40 pm
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      I think you can grant access to a folder in the same way. Give it a try.

      Reply
  • November 30, 2016 at 10:35 am
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    The permission section fixed my issue Thanks 🙂

    Reply
    • December 2, 2016 at 8:40 pm
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      Great to hear it helped.

      Reply
  • February 5, 2017 at 1:07 am
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    i saw an acess denied message on the explorer.exe. what do i do next because the permissions are already granted

    Reply
  • February 5, 2017 at 8:41 pm
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    My suggestion is try follow through which file is the explorer.exe trying to access.

    Reply
  • March 6, 2017 at 8:22 am
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    Thank you, everything now is OK!

    Reply
  • March 11, 2017 at 4:05 pm
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    Having Process Monitor running fixes the error for me, so I can’t use it to debug.

    Reply
  • April 4, 2017 at 1:18 pm
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    Win 10 – fix- error (0xxc0000022) with Adobe Acrobat DC right click Adobe Acrobat, slect prop >,security, in securities remove “inherited permissions” from user with ?

    Reply
  • April 18, 2017 at 9:49 am
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    There is no security tab what now?

    Reply
  • May 17, 2017 at 8:50 pm
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    Since the Windows 10 started to use the outlook.com account to do the access control, the previous security setting with local administrator or users somehow doesn’t work any longer. So I tried to add the emails for all my users (granted read and execute privilege).

    hi, can you give me step-by-step instruction to do this?

    Reply
  • May 31, 2017 at 12:02 pm
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    It’s a damn virus. Fileless Rootkit. Just install the latest Malware bytes and run a complete scan with rootkits checked in the prefernces.

    Reply
  • September 20, 2017 at 12:58 pm
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    As Chris said looks like it was a virus. I ran malwarebytes on two separate computer and it fixed the issue.

    Reply
  • June 26, 2018 at 2:18 am
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    Thanks you. It works.

    Reply
  • October 4, 2018 at 7:28 pm
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    Thank you! I actually thought it was compatibility issues so I was going to buy the updated program Office 2016. Turns out it was just a security issue. Just had to go in and unblock it.

    Reply
  • February 1, 2019 at 5:14 am
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    Reply

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