Chris Read

Up until now I’ve managed to avoid ranting here, but I can no longer resist! After all these years of experience, why are the error messages in windows still generally meaningless? Is it because there are so many of them?

The problem I faced was trying to patch a game. Downloaded the patch, tried to apply it, but got the message “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)”. Much confusion. Downloaded from another source, tried again, same error. Tried on my laptop, and this time it worked perfectly. What’s the problem?

Turns out the patch is written in .Net, and I don’t have the correct version of the runtime installed on my desktop, but I do have it on my laptop. I only had .Net 1.0, and it needs a newer version. Good thing the error message told me that in the first place then, isn’t it…