I was working on a client’s virus infected laptop the other day, running Windows XP.  Prior to looking at the computer, I had talked to her over the phone.  She said that she was getting an error message that said:

lsass.exe – Application Error
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I quickly informed her that any other time that I have seen this message, it’s been virus related.

After picking up the laptop and bringing it back to the shop, I easily reproduced the error message that she had described.  Sure enough, there was the lsass.exe error message.

Based on what I have seen in the past, I decided to assume that it was virus related.

I flipped over the infected laptop, found the hard drive compartment and removed the hard drive with my small “phillips” screwdriver.

AT this point, I plugged the laptop hard drive into my workbench computer via my laptop ATA adapter.  Note:  If this had been a SATA laptop drive, a standard SATA data cable and power connection would be just fine.

So, I fired up my workbench computer and booted to my main XP OS, which has Kaspersky and a variety of other tools already installed.  Keep in mind that when I say “my workbench computer”, it’s basically just a high-powered workstation with the side cover removed and plenty of places to plug in SATA and PATA hard drives.  So, you can use whatever spare computer you have around (or a friend, family member’s or neighbors).

Kaspersky ran and found a ton of infected files on the drive, and automatically quarentined them.  After Kaspersky ran, I told Malware Bytes to scan (for good measure).  Note that you can probably use other Antivirus tools, but these are the ones we use here in the shop.  Also, keep in mind that you can use Kaspersky’s 30-day trial edition to perform this same task, and Malware Bytes is free.

After the scan was done and all of the “unwanted” files were removed, I shut down my workbench computer, disconnected the drive and reinstalled the laptop hard drive back into laptop.

I then plugged the computer in, hit the power button and waited.

Problem solved!  The computer fired right up and went straight to the desktop.

After the computer booted up all the way, I installed Kaspersky onto the system and ran it.  Kaspersky found a few things in the registry and removed them, so I decided to run Malware Bytes again too.  It also found a few things.  Just for kicks I ran Spybot S&D and once again, it found a few suspicious items.  Just so that we are clear, I removed everything that any of the programm found.

Afterwards, I cleaned up using CCleaner and everything ran very smoothly after that.

At least in this instance, running a virus scan on the drive from an external system will certainly resolve the “lsass.exe – Application Error – The application failed to initialize properly” error.

If you are looking to resolve your lsass.exe error, this is a great place to start.

Good luck.

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