I would've expected a DLL load error to be ACCESS_DENIED instead of ACCESS_VIOLATION because the path for the DLL goes through a system call to open the file.

I would've expected a DLL load error to be ACCESS_DENIED instead of ACCESS_VIOLATION because the path for the DLL goes through a system call to open the file. ACCESS_VIOLATION would be more like dereferencing a null pointer, but it's been a number of years since I had to troubleshoot this far in on Windows. I suppose it's possible they didn't check for the error in the open file syscall then tried to use the uninitialized file handle for the DLL which caused the segfault.