Vista. What an poorly executed piece of software. Mr. Gates should be ashamed of himself.
I’ve been working on a friend’s computer lately trying to track down an elusive Vista freeze. There were errors recorded in the event viewer but the description said “The description for Event ID 4 (QuickBooks) cannot be found … The following information is part of the event: QuickBooks, Returning NULL QBWinInstance Handle.” Which means that Vista had a problem, but the software is so messed up it can’t even tell you what the problem was. Turns out that QuickBooks 2008 tries to install Intuit’s own version of the .NET 2.0 framework which, of course, can nuke the system. Once the .NET framework is corrupted you’re pretty much done. There are a couple of fixes that you can try listed on their site but they didn’t work for me. (Unfortunately the fixes are meant for XP where you can reinstall .NET 2.0) The only thing you can do after those efforts fail is reinstall Vista and start all over. I’m going to do that now and hope I can stop Quickbooks from installing it’s copy of .NET.
PS – I’m beta testing the next version of Windows; Windows 7. It doesn’t seem any better. I think Windows 7 is a hurried attempt to “fix” Vista to try to regain some market share. Microsoft has to shed the name Vista as quickly as possible.
