Update: I have confirmed that Rizal’s suggestion in the comments fixes the problem. Add a “--no-sandbox” argument to the Chrome shortcut and Chrome should start working. To do this right click on the Chrome desktop icon. In the Target box add “--no-sandbox” without the quotes to the very end of the box.

Update2: Chrome’s sandbox is an additional security feature that restricts each browser process from accessing anything on the system that it is running on. So disabling it is usually not a good idea. But in this case the browser is so new that people are mostly using it as a test and to verify website compatibility so I think most people are ok with disabling it. As far as I know using the “no sandbox” argument is no worse than browsing with the current version of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Google or Symantec will fix the problem in a future release and you can re-enable the sandbox at that time.

Original post:

I installed the new Google’s new Chrome browser within minutes of being released. It installed ok but it wouldn’t run at all. As soon as it started up I would get this error:

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click ok to terminate the application.

This appears to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP). Unfortunately I am running this on a corporate machine and there is no way for me to disable or configure the Symantec software.

Uninstalling SEP is always an option to get Chrome to work. Another less drastic method that was posted online:

I was able to go into SEP – Change Settings – Centralized Exceptions,
click Configure Settings, and add c:\documents and settings\<username>
\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
to the list. However I had to reboot the machine to be able to open up chrome w/out the error message.

For more information read this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/google-chrome-help-troubleshooting/browse_thread/thread/41ef35857180e154/.