Google Talk fat client refuses to start

A while ago I noticed that my Google Talk fat client didn’t want to start anymore, in fact, it did absolutely nothing. Even after reinstalling and completely removing all the caches, remaining files and registry keys, the application still wouldn’t start at all.

Google’ing for some help only resulted in more people having the same problem without a solution at all. In this post I got my first clue about the problem: FAST IO DISALLOWED.

These three words actually tell everything:
FAST IO: Google Talk is doing something special with it’s I/O’s
DISALLOWD: Windows doesn’t like Google doing this and thus refuses this action

So we have to digg a bit deeper in the (new) security features of Windows 7. As you may or may not know, Windows 7 comes with some additional security features like Address Space Layout Randomization and Structured Exception Hanlder Overwrite Protection. However, by default, these security features are not enforced to ensure a certain backwards compatibility with older applications.

As I am and always will be a geek I have installed the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) which allows us to change this “opt-in behaviour” to an “opt-out behaviour”. As I’m also a bit paranoia I had configured EMET to force the “opt-out behaviour”.

Just to test it I had reverted the settings to default and after a reboot I quickly got the Google Talk window on my screen.

So, if your Google Talk fat client doesn’t start on Windows 7 then you should definately check your EMET settings.

This post was originally posted on my My.Opera blog on Thursday, February 16, 2012 6:26:15 PM. This post has been copied to my WordPress blog since the My.Opera blogging service will be discontinued.