Game won't launch as non-admin

D

Deef

Spearman
Jan 11, 2021
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Hi! I run my games in a separate (non-admin) account, so I was quite happy when the new 3.3.1 launcher didn't require admin access anymore. However, it still doesn't function when not run in admin mode; clicking "play" gives an error in Spartan.exe ("The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000022).").

Incidentally, I get the same error just straight up launching spartan.exe without using the launcher. Both function fine in admin mode. My current user account is the owner of spartan.exe, so I'm not quite sure what's going wrong. Seems to indicate it's not a launcher issue.
 
Hi, i had the same problem and nobody aswered. I resolve the problem only with reinstalling the entiere game
 
Interesting, do you have the game installed through Steam or the retail installer (C:\Program Files (x86)\Age of Empires Online\)?
 
Alright, so then the permission change with the launcher seems to be unlikely to be the case here. With Steam, the launcher doesn't need admin perms to modify the files when doing a game scan. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that error code, maybe @Kevsoft has any insights? Could be we have a log file somewhere that says what file or operation that the game attempts to do before it crashes.
 
Sure - tell me where to look and I'll share what I can! The launcher logs in /Logs don't show anything interesting.
 
Directplay is installed. The game crashes with a notification box on startup. Everything works completely fine in admin mode. Luciano may take a look at it tho <3
 
According to Microsoft docs, this seems to be related to permissions:
0xC0000022 - STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED: {Access Denied} A process has requested access to an object but has not been granted those access rights.

The question then is what it is trying to access that it doesn't have access to. You said your local Windows account doesn't have admin rights. Maybe it can have something to do with this? I will try an test this out on a VM later to try and reproduce this issue.
 
I just managed to reproduce this:
1. Set up a clean W10 20H2 VM
2. Create two accounts: Admin (which has full admin rights), and User (standard user without admin rights)
3. On Admin: Installed AoEO through Steam and patched the game using the launcher
4. Switch to User, download the launcher on this account and try start offline mode

I'll try and investigate a bit more and see what I can find out.
 
With procmon I found out that xlive.dll does not automatically have execute permissions set. That causes some problems when Spartan.exe tries to load it. After granting it sufficient perms, there was another bottleneck where it said some game files are corrupt. I've also seen some other issues with the launcher that I will look into later.

For now I would recommend you to use a Windows account that has administrator rights on your system to start the game. It might even be the case that the game does not support being started with a non-admin Windows account. (Note that running the game as administrator/elevated rights and an account with admin perms are two different things)
 
Hi guys from 5 days i try to run this nice game where i played ago whit friends and as FAN Veteran player from Age of empires 1 Rise of Rome 98-99 :) I love to play AOE , but i get always a game crash seems game cerash at the loging screen. i use Win 10prox64 nice high end class from 2017 Asus Rog G752vs but keep geting the same Problem the game crash right after try to log in game its po up window whit crash report the Game stop running close the program...QQ i dont know how to fix it..plz help guys..
 
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