How To Fix ‘The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000018)’ in Windows 10

Seems a number of users are experiencing this particular error, The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000018), after upgrading to Windows 10. I recently worked on one such computer for one of my clients.

application error

This issue doesn’t appear to affect one application in particular but rather randomly affects different applications on different machines. On my client’s machine, he was receiving this error each time he tried to run VLC Media Player and/or open a command prompt. After spending some time tinkering with the system to no avail I finally resorted to searching the internet for a solution.

I came across several suggestions, including s registry hack, but the one that worked for me involved Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit. Seems this problem can occur after upgrading to Windows 10 from a Windows 7/8/8.1 system with Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit installed.

mbae-interface-win10

Sure enough, my client confirmed that he had Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit installed on the Windows 7 system he upgraded to Windows 10.

The solution was to uninstall Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit in Windows 10 and re-install. It’s a simple fix but only if you know which application is the culprit in the first place. So, if you’re experiencing similar issues after upgrading a system with Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit installed, this should fix it for you.

 

6 thoughts on “How To Fix ‘The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000018)’ in Windows 10”

  1. Love these tips helps me a great deal when working on people’s systems. This will save me from all that research which you already took care of. Thanks Jim

  2. If a DLL requires to be loaded at a fixed address(in process virtual address space), but the requirement cannot be fulfilled, Windows asserts the very 0xC0000018 error. But anyways, Thanks jim for your life saving tip.

  3. My wife and I thought I had gotten a serious virus but then decided to Google the error msg and eventually landed on your page which described our situation almost exactly. My new laptop came with Win 10 (rather than the upgrade scenario) and we did just install Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit a few days ago. We uninstalled that, rebooted and all was well again. Thanks so much Jim for taking the time to post about this issue.

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