“This Application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way”

When starting a Toshiba notebook, the system displays “This Application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way.” Upon clicking OK, the message keeps reappearing about half-a-dozen times before the system proceeds to the login prompt. After logging in the system behaves normally.

This may occur if the system has Toshiba Face Recognition installed (SmartFaceVWatchSrv.exe), and some mismatched DLLs are on the system. It has been observed to occur mostly on systems which shipped with Windows Vista and were later upgraded to Windows 7. Toshiba may not offer a Windows 7 version of the software for such a model.

To resolve, uninstall Toshiba Face Recognition or use Sysinternals' Autoruns to disable smartfacevcp.dll in the Winlogon section.