My company used Quickbooks Enterprise (QBE) 2011 until our support was deprecated in May 2014. We ran the 2011 version as long as possible because we know the upgrade process with Quickbooks is often a huge time sink. We also understood that QBE 2012 and 2013 suffered from some serious problems and performance issues based on research. So, when we moved to QBE 2014, we moved carefully with backups and trepidation. Still, we encountered a major bug which we have not seen listed or resolved after 6 months. I am blogging about the process to bring attention to this bug with hope for a resolution. I also hope that QBE support will improve and generally QC at intuit will dramatically improve. The bug I am highlighting was dramatically worsened by another issue, which is that QBW32.exe rarely closes successfully when closing the software and QBE crashes too frequently.
The bug report we sent to Intuit is below:
Hello,
We recently upgraded to QB Enterprise 2014. We have been having recurring issues where quickbooks gives us an unrecoverable error when logging in. We went through QuickBooks tech support and were then forwarded on to the Data Services Group to restore our files to working condition.
The explanation we were given for the nature of this unrecoverable error that locks us out of our company file is that a window or window(s) were being left open when we closed our file and that this somehow was causing quickbooks to have an unrecoverable error. It turns out the “fix” for this is to hold down the alt key while logging into quickbooks.
We were told that this was in fact not a bug several times by the person in data services group; however, being locked out of your company file and being presented with a completely vague “unrecoverable error” that the first tier of tech support was clueless about for the “mistake” of “leaving a window open” seems ridiculous at best. This is not an uncommon or rare behavior at all and is certainly not an issue we ever ran into in years of using quickbooks prior to upgrading to 2011. Since receiving our working file back this issue has cropped up once again.
Please understand that this is a bug. Throwing an unrecoverable error with no details and that your first tier tech support cannot answer because a window is left open (which I again don’t understand how this qualifies as a mistake) certainly seems to fit the description of a bug to me and the software developers on our staff.
This has caused us to waste an enormous amount of our staffs time this week.
Please see to it that this is filed as a bug and is resolved going forward. We are aware of the “alt key trick” to get back into the file now but the person we spoke to seemed to think that this was OK to leave as is.
Here is what happened:
Unrecoverable error when trying to login to our file as soon as the interface for quickbooks began loading after logging into the file.
Quickbooks Unrecoverable Error: 14664 59300 is the error we most frequently ran into. The issue occurred when a user either closed their session or Quickbooks crashed or did not close properly. So, under either condition we would have major data corruption that locked us out of Quickbooks which is wholly unacceptable.
Our long term resolution to this problem follows:
The process is outlined here. You will want to use the “Don’t save the desktop” option once you get to the correct settings form.
Effectively you go to Edit -> Preferences -> Desktop View (left column of prefs) -> Don’t save the desktop. This will return you to an empty desktop each time you open the company file.
The short term resolution was just to hold the alt key while opening the offending file and close any windows.
We have stayed on the R5 release due to major bugs in an R6 update that persist in R7. There has been no resolution after 6 months to those existing issues. Our QBE2014 was a bug riddled time soak. The labor time spent to resolve the problem far exceeded the software cost and we were forced to upgrade due to payroll and general support deprecation.
QBE support was poorly informed, had a poor process and it took us dozens of hours before we were informed of the basic problem, ability to open an unwindowed file with the alt key and a preferences change. Our resolution is currently effective and we are once again working effectively. We will be evaluating other software options prior to our forced 2017 upgrade (3 year support cycle).