Hey guys,
I have problems to start my witcher 3 GOTY edition. In some google search I found out that deleting the galaxy.dll in C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt GOTY\bin\x64 could help and it did. But I don't thin it is a good thing to delete .dll's which come allong with the game. Did anyone solve the problem a better way?

My setup:
GTX 1070, i5 11400F, 16GB RAM, Windows 10 Pro, GOG 2.0.37.384 all drivers are up to date and all devices are working fine in other games like Cyberpunk 2077 (<3). Also I disabled gog overlay (on/off did not make a difference).

greetings and stay healthy!

I can only recommend, as a general rule, to reinstall/move both program and games outside of system folders, and even better is to another nonsystem drive.

hey thank you for your answer. I was just running the defaultest of the default installations. Like just press install and next next next. I don't have another physical drive the only possible way would be to reinstall my whole system with logical seperated partitions. I dont want to do this and hope there is another solution.

EDIT:
I also reinstalled and checked the installation with gog galaxy programm. no problems where found.

Is there an installed working antivirus? Does the problem persist if you turn it off while launching the game?
Also what OS are you using?

I probably meant to write down "before" instead of "while", but you've figured it out already.

It looks like the library gets prevented from its further execution, when called.
Since it's located in system protected/aware folder, the system itself might be doing it with its default security settings.

I recommend to look around within Windows Security center, especially Reputation-based protection part.
For the later, go to "App & browser control", "Reputation-based protected settings" and find "Potentially unwanted app blocking" section. Here you can try to tick off various options and look into its protection history for what has been blocked in the past.

There is also a Defender "Controlled folder access" policy, see here.

install it outside of program files, wont have this issue anymore, this is the common issue and solution for anyone with this issue.

You can successfully launch W3-GOTY with Galaxy.dll in folder blocking all communication or even allowing it with Galaxy disabled in a non-active state without a crash.