Quicken 2009 Scheduled Transaction Bug
Last night, for the second time in less than a month my Quicken data file was hosed up by a bug in Quicken 2009 R6. The bug causes a single scheduled transaction to automatically keep entering itself into the register when starting Quicken. Quicken looks like it freezes but what’s actually happening is the scheduled transaction is being entered one after another on into the future until you kill Quicken.
The first time this happened, our monthly utility bill was entered every month up to the year 4800. This causes the QDF file to grow huge. Mine went from 12 MB to 120 MB. The second time this happened one of our scheduled deposits entered 300 years into the future before I realized what was happening and killed Quicken. The QDF file had grown to 30 MB this time.
The fix is to:
1. Backup your quicken data files!!!!!!!!!!!!
2. Set your system clock back to 12/31/2008.
3. Open quicken.
4. Delete the problem scheduled transaction.
5. Set your system clock back to current date.
6. Open quicken and run a verify on the data file.
7. Delete all the erroneously entered scheduled transaction – in the register, filter by date into the future ~300 years at a time (more than that and Quicken will crash), highlight them all and delete. Do that changing the date filter until all the bad transactions are gone.
8. Recreate the scheduled transaction you previously deleted.
9. Run verify again.
Your QDF file will still be huge so I did a File -> File Operations -> Copy. The new copy won’t have all the empty space from those hundreds/thousands of years of transactions you just deleted. Use the new copy as your active Quicken file.
Intuit has a support article on this issue with similar instructions but I can’t find it now.
We’ve changed all our scheduled transactions to be reminders, not automatically entered. This is a highly annoying bug. Intuit sucks.
I found the Intuit support article: Quicken freezes when attempting to open a data file created prior to 1/1/09
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4 Responses to “Quicken 2009 Scheduled Transaction Bug”
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Thanks for the great post. I had a scheduled transaction that was stuck and writing journals until the year 4573! fortunately enough I had a backup and rolled my clock back to the day prior to the problem. I promptly deleted the transaction and I was all good to go.
Thank you,
very interesting article
Amazing! I am glad I found this post a second time. This problem happened to me before and again the 28 of Feb. When I wrote Quicken support, they weren’t even aware of it! They replied,”…I would like to inform you that we are not aware of this issue with Quicken 2009 or Quicken 2010. It seems that there is some damage in your data file. I suggest you to delete all wrong schedule payments from your data file once and then follow the steps mentioned in the below link to remove damage from the data file…” Question remains, did they fix it in Q 2010? I’ll see how they answer.
I started Quicken 2009 Deluxe, and it froze. (great). Quick fix. — close quicken / change the Quicken folder name (example “quicken1″) / reopen quicken let it search for the folder and open your file.!!! If you want do the prosses again and change the folder name back to Quiken.