MinGW / gcc: The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)

Question

I have been using MinGW and the GNU Fortran compiler for a while in order to compile Fortran programs on Windows, which has always been a successful method. However, I have been getting the following error for the past 4 days:
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.

The error only happens when running applications that I wrote myself, and that I compiled using the MinGW/gfortran combo. When compiling using Visual Studio and iFort, I have no problem running the applications. The error seems retroactive: applications that were compiled using gfortran a long time ago and ran perfectly until now also break, even though I didn't recompile them. This leads me to think that it is a dynamic library problem. Online searches show that it probably is a compatibility problem between a 64-bit dll and a 32-bit application

I am using Windows 7. One of the latest things I remember doing before starting to get the problem was trying to update MinGW ; I used the mingw-get update and mingw-get upgrade command lines.

After looking around online, I have tried the following fixes:
- reinstalled the Visual C++ Runtime Environment
- reinstalled the .NET framework
- downloaded and replaced a bunch of .dlls like mscvr100.dll, mscvr100d.dll, etc...
- uninstalled and reinstalled MinGW in order to make sure I had the latest gcc version
- run Dependency Walker on a simple application ("Hello World!" type program)

Dependency Walker tells me that a number of .dlls cannot be found (full list: API-MS-WIN-APPMODEL-RUNTIME-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ERROR-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ROBUFFER-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-SHCORE-SCALING-L1-1-1.DLL, DCOMP.DLL, GPSVC.DLL, IESHIMS.DLL).
It also highlights in red the libquadmath-0.dll (on which libgfortran-3.dll seems to depend). Indeed, it seems that libquadmath-0.dll is a 64-bit DLL in the middle of a 32-bit program. When opening said .dll with Dependency Walker, I can see that all the modules in this library are x86 except the library itself which is x64 (CPU column of DW). I am not exactly sure how this is possible / how to fix it. The library is found in the Python/Anaconda folder (I installed Python and Anaconda a few weeks ago, the problem did NOT appear at that time).

If anybody has an idea of how to get my environment to work again without reinstalling Windows, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. Looking at Dependency Walker I wasn't loading API-MS-WIN-CORE entries. However, when I went to edit my path it turned out that by bin folder wasn't on the path. Adding, in my case the mingw64 bin folder to the path fixed this issue for me. I only mention the API-MS-WIN-CORE entries since I thought it might be the problem, but in reality it wasn't causing my issue.