As a test, temporarily disable your antivirus software and see if the error persists. If it goes away, add an exception for the entire Rainmeter folder in your antivirus settings and re-enable it.
Rainmeter uses DirectX for hardware acceleration. If your d3d9.dll or dxgi.dll is corrupt, Error 126 appears.
Error 126 means that you are missing dependencies (e.g. you are dynamically linking Lua but didn't add Lua. dll to the extension), GameMaker Community Rainmeter.dll Load Error 126
Several underlying issues can trigger this specific error within Rainmeter:
Many Rainmeter skins utilize GPU acceleration. If your graphics drivers (especially older AMD/ATI drivers ) are outdated or have conflicting files in the System32 folder, the load request will fail. The Path to Resolution As a test, temporarily disable your antivirus software
The "ghost" in the machine usually takes one of three forms:
Most Rainmeter plugins are written in C++ and require specific Microsoft Visual C++ runtime libraries to function. If these libraries are missing, Windows will throw Error 126. If your d3d9
A third-party Rainmeter skin relies on a plugin that is missing or compiled for the wrong CPU architecture (e.g., a 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit Rainmeter installation).
Rainmeter plugins often write to .dll files in Documents\Rainmeter\Plugins . An AV sees a process loading a DLL from a user document folder and blocks it, returning Error 126.
Did this error happen ? Which version of Windows are you currently running?
Error 126 is a standard Windows error code ( ERROR_MOD_NOT_FOUND ), which means "The specified module could not be found." When this pops up in the context of Rainmeter.dll , it means that a crucial component required for Rainmeter to function—often a plugin ( .dll file) used by a skin—is missing, corrupted, or not properly registered in Windows. Rainmeter skins fail to load on system startup.