Google Chrome Crashes and Burns
While I have had my issues with Google on a few occassions I was optimistic to try out Google Chrome as I mentioned yesterday. I waited till about noon and fired up VMWare Fusion at work on my MacBook Pro and installed Chrome without issue on Windows XP. It seemed to work ok, although the initial reviewson Chrome left much to be desired, and at least left Firefox the speed king. I thought I would give it a shot when I got home from work and the gym so I fired up my trusty Dell desktop and Windows Vista and installed it. The machine itself is about a year and a half old with a Duo 2 processor and 2 gigs of RAM on the 32 bit version of Vista. After installation I’m immediately greeted with:
Wow that’s not good. What happened? I read Matt Cutt’s blog entry today, which in part touted how stable it was, and not full of bugs. Part of his self Q&A mentioned:
Q: This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
A: No, I don’t really think so. Google determined one million pages that users are likely to surf to. Then a piece of software known as “ChromeBot” ran a torture test by loading those one million pages that we crawled for every new build of Google Chrome. This is a smart testing methodology because this real-world torture test quickly highlighted which bugs were most important to fix and helped determine priorities for the most important bugs. So Google Chrome has already been automatically “fuzz tested” on tons of web pages. Google Chrome is very robust against anything the web can throw at it. If I had to guess where the browser might crash, it would be because we haven’t seen Google Chrome run across all the weird, wild hardware that runs Windows. But I’ve been using Google Chrome for months with essentially no crashes; it’s been rock-solid for me.
Now I wasn’t expecting a rock solid piece of software, but at least the ability to launch the browser, and navigate to a website I thought was within reach. I understand that testing one million pages is quite a feat, but ensuring that the application can be installed on a run of the mill Dell computer with Vista might be helpful as well. Clicking “Ok’ on the error message just left me with the following:
I appreciate the humor that Google put on the sad face, but all it did was leave me frustrated. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem, either did un-installing and reinstalling. After I sent a message to Google letting them know about the problem I haven’t found much about the problem online so far. So here I sit eager to play around with Google’s first attempt at a web browser, but unable to do so because of error messages and sad faces that leave me reminisicent of the days of the sad Mac icon:
Has anyone else had any issues with Google Chrome, either during installation or while utilizing the browser? Update: This issue has been somewhat resolved and you can read about it here.



I installed Chrome on a Windows XP SP2 box the app failed to start. It crashes throwing an error saying application failed to initialize (with some memory address) click OK to terminate the application. It is really frustrating..
Yes, I have precisely the same problem.
“application fails to start”
0xc0000005 error + sad face
Couldn’t scroll upward.
Slow.
Crashed.
Surfed to a youtube page with a video to show the features of Chrome and the video stalled within Chrome = sad face.
We’ll wait to try again.
I feel your pain, same problem. Does anyone know of a fix yet?
I too have this same problem. Very disappointing.
Yep, same error as everyone else and sent a note to Google.
Add this to the shortcut –no-sandbox
Same problem for me..
its not only the chrome browser that crashed . the entire windows crashed with blue freezing window every time i open any application even after uninstalling chrome. the most devastating problem is that windows firewall and its registry was gone. performing repair with windows installation cd fixed the problem of blue windows but never fixed the problem of firewall
i have dell inspiron 1525 with windows xp sp2 instlled
[...] doing some research it looks like the issue I mentioned previously is caused by Symantec Endpoint Protection. While there is currently no official fix [...]
End point protection, yes that makes sense. I’ve tried installing chrome on two machines, both with Symantec Endpoint Protection, and both failed with the same error.
I have the same problem… and i have Symantec Endpoint Protection!!!…. Is there a Solution???!!!!
I was unlucky enough to install Chrome at my desktop. After two days, Vista started to give weird dll errors (related to Chrome/Google updater).So I have re-installed my Vista last night till 2 oclock.
here is a fix
1) Back up the registry on an affected system.
2) Open the registry on the Agent system by entering regedit from a run prompt.
3) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysPlant.
4) Open the Start DWORD.
5) Change the value to 4 to disable the drivers.
6) Reboot the system to commit the changes
Running Yahoo stattracker for Fantasy Football or CBS Sportsline running flash, Chrome freezes the whole machine for 2 minutes and then reports that the plugin has crashed. Separate processes my ass.
On my office Dell D430 with 2 DUO Core and 2GB or RAM, Chrome causes SAV LiveUpdate to max the machine at 100% CPU until reinstalled.