Recently, at the old work place, I encountered a problem on one of our accountant's workstations. On this station, starting up QuickBooks Pro 2008 caused the Windows Installer to pop up (usually locking somewhere around "Preparing to install...", but sometimes making it to the install screen). Going through the installation (again) did not work. Intuit has a knowledgebase article on this (http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/knowledgebasearticle/1005515.html) that makes three suggestions:
- Reregister QuickBooks's DLLs with the reboot.bat script in the QuickBooks directory
- Repair the .NET framework versions (1.1 and 2.0, in this case) for the QuickBooks version
- Reinstall QuickBooks
In my case, none of these worked. A blog entry, which I cannot seem to find now, suggested uninstalling QuickBooks, removing the .NET framework and reinstalling. For good measure, it also recommended using some tools available for download through MSDN to completely nuke .NET from the system. This also, did not work. What I found did work, however, was running QuickBooks as another user on the same machine. Same permissions, mind you, as the accountant, but someone else. This worked, but was a pain in the neck, as I had to keep logging the user into QuickBooks. The final solution, was to wrap this little bit of hackery in a batch script, create a shortcut to it, and replace the user's icons (desktop & start menu) with the shortcut to the batch script--oh, and change the icon for good measure.
The batch script follows, with the username expurgiated:
runas /savecred /user:"C:\Program Files\Intuit\QuickBooks 2008\QBW32Pro.exe"
After trying this several times, it appears to be working fine. My assumption is that the problem lies somewhere in the registry settings for that user's profile. It isn't some sort of broad permissions issue, since the user was able to start the program fine before. Even now, the only problem is that it loops into the installer. Several registry scans and cleanups failed to find the problem. Why does QuickBooks have to be such a pain in the neck?