Quicken 2005 installation problems

I decided to upgrade my Quicken to the latest version last night – Quicken Personal Plus 2005. I’m a subscription member, so I get it sent to me automatically, but I’ve been away a lot of late and rather busy so I didn’t get around to updating.

Well, I followed the instructions supplied with the software carefully for how to prepare for the upgrade, and the software installation went smoothly and everything looked good.

Then when I went to start the program, I was prompted to enter my installation key code. I typed in the number that they provided with the software, and clicked OK. Bam ! Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). *sob*.

Okay, I thought, no problem, probably just something went wrong somewhere. Tried it again, nope, instant BSoD when I clicked the OK button.

I tried shutting down all other software I could, and most of the services in Windows XP, but no joy – still BSoDed. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. No joy.

I gave up in disgust and thought I’d try calling support this morning when they opened … at $4.90 a minute !!! What a complete ripoff !

The guy on the support line really didn’t seem interested in being there or talking to me – he faxed me some information on how to boot in safe mode for installation, which I followed, but it didn’t help. I gave up again and concentrated on my other work for the day.

Tonight I thought I’d be a bit more scientific about the process.

Given that at the point I clicked OK, the software would be attempting to connect to Intuit to register my software, so I thought that perhaps there was something about the networking setup I had that was causing problems. I tinkered with as many settings as I could, but even booting in safe mode without networking support still BSoDed.

I wondered if the system was getting confused with some of the other Intuit software I had on the system (Quickbooks) – some of it does network access and I remembered that the uninstall process that removed Quicken 2004 did not remove some of the “shared” components. I didn’t want to uninstall Quickbooks, so I went through and moved all the directories I could find that related to Quicken or Quickbooks, and even renamed the registry entries, trying to make it look like a clean system. After a reboot, I tried installing Quickbooks 2005 again, but it still did a BSoD when I clicked OK.

I played around a bit more, and the next time it crashed, I paid a little more attention to the crash error message. It mentioned a driver file si3112r.sys

Google helped here, informing me that this driver is for the Serial ATA hard drive support that comes with the motherboard I have in my computer. The main boot drive is SATA – so I couldn’t even disable the driver temporarily to see if that would help. I tried the ASUS website to see if there were any new drivers, and there were, so I downloaded the latest version v1.0.50 (I had v1.0.33 I think) and installed it, rebooted, and then tried again.

Oooh, it worked !

So after all that messing about, if I’d just paid more attention to the error message in the first place, I would have made much more rapid progress. *sigh*

Oh well… I hope this helps someone else out there … if you are running a Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller with Windows XP driver v1.0.33, and you are having trouble entering the installation key code into Quicken 2005, then try upgrading the drivers of the SATA controller to the latest version … it fixed it for me !

Now … time to play with Quicken 2005 – so far it looks pretty awesome – they’ve done some major redesign of the interface and it looks really good. I’ll write more over at the Accounting Software Forums once I’ve had a bit more time to play and work out what the new features are.