PROBLEM

Presenting the problem and the solution together:

While developing some Selenium code, I encountered the error [WinError 193] %1 is not a valid Win32 application, which was always related to my Selenium webdriver. I quickly realized this by debugging the code, but it took me several hours to actually solve the problem.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "path/to/navegador.py", line 49, in iniciar_navegador
    navegador = webdriver.Chrome(service=servico, options=chrome_options)
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "path/to/selenium/webdriver/chrome/webdriver.py", line 45, in __init__
    super().__init__(
  File "path/to/selenium/webdriver/chromium/webdriver.py", line 55, in __init__
    self.service.start()
  File "path/to/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py", line 98, in start
    self._start_process(self._path)
  File "path/to/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py", line 208, in _start_process
    self.process = subprocess.Popen(
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "path/to/python/Lib/subprocess.py", line 1026, in __init__
    self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
  File "path/to/python/Lib/subprocess.py", line 1538, in _execute_child
    hp, ht, pid, tid = _winapi.CreateProcess(executable, args,

SOLUTION

The solution to the problem I was facing was to understand what was causing the error. I checked my driver_path and where it was installed:

driver_path = ChromeDriverManager().install()
print(f"ChromeDriver path: {driver_path}")

Then I realized that the return I was getting was not chromedriver.exe but another type of file.

• Print output:

ChromeDriver path: C:\Users\User\.wdm\drivers\chromedriver\win64\127.0.6533.72\chromedriver-win32/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.chromedriver

So, I did the following: I went to the location where the file was installed using File Explorer, deleted the two files LICENSE.chromedriver and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.chromedriver, leaving only chromedriver.exe, and then ran my code again. After this, the browser opened normally, and the code worked as expected.