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So the opening of the dialog happens when user association hash verification fails if I recall correctly.

Shell32.dll has the code for it under QueryUserAssocAndVerifyHash I believe. Perhaps they've interfered with the hash interpretation for Chrome or Chrome is hooking into it in a different way - Firefox directly computes and writes a new hash to the registry.

Raw diffs of binaries may or may not help, depending, but it's not likely to help as much as you might think. If you can get the source code (C++, assembly, whatever), then there's no need to reverse engineer anything.

I would think it would be the Windows equivalent of `grep -a Chrome -R C:/Windows`, right? Then, when it finds the file, just hexdump and/or disassemble it to learn more. Maybe they're scrambling the executable somehow?

I wonder if there's any stability there given compiler features like LTO and PGO