Application Error 0xc0000142 on Windows Server 2008 R2 after crash

Our server crashed a few days ago, cause was a HDD failure. The server seems to be almost fully functional (except that the Exchange DB is corrupt now, but that's another story)

The main problem now is that Windows system applications like cmd.exe, sfc.exe etc. won't run because of error "The application failed to initialize properly (0xC0000142)"(STATUS_DLL_INIT_FAILED).

We have not found a way to fix this error. We've been reading every single post about this error code on google but we found no solution yet. Maybe an expert around that could give some tips and hints?

The most unfortunate thing is that the backup system failed silently 1 month ago. The last bare metal backup is 1 month old, and so is the Exchange db and everything else.

Now I have this semi working server in front of me and I don't know how to fix this mess.

My plan now is to install a fresh Windows Server on a new pair of HDDs, manually reconstruct active directory user and then try to somehow restore the Exchange DB and make it match, but after some researching this seems to be almost impossile. A cross forrest migration is not possible because the crashed server refuses to run anything that requires the command line, so I can't run all the commands and scripts required in a cross forrest migration.

I believe I'm screwed, right? We have 15 users and the Exchange 2010 DB is 16GB big, by the way.

Any help would be really appreciated.

It sounds to be like the system files are corrupt due to previous HD failure. Reinstall the OS by running the "repair" command from booting for windows server 2008 R2 disk. This will reinstall the OS files while leaving your data in place.