Microsoft Musings

Recently I received the following comment on my post (which has over 200 comments already) about an Internet Explorer problem. I had to chuckle when I read it and thought it was worth sharing.

This worked! Thanks. That was a really annoying problem.

My other computer which also runs XP doesn’t have the problem, but after I installed the fix on this one I discovered that it already has that entry.

But why does it have to be this way? Imagine what life would be like if all our electronic products required this degree of fiddling and bug fixes. Why, we would turn on a lamp, only to get an incomprehensible error message. We’d copy it down, Google it, and come to a site like this and find some incomprehensible gobbledy-gook to try as a solution. Some of us couldn’t make heads or tails of it, while others would manage to install it. Voila! the light goes on. But then the refrigerator issues some kind of warning and goes off. And the toaster hasn’t worked for a week. And the car stopped in the middle of the road yesterday, and some motorist said the thingami package needed to be reinstalled and the registers cleaned out of electronic gunk. “You need to update your anti-roadblock software,” the motorist said as the car finally started again. “Or this’ll keep on happening. Don’t get Norton, though.”

Recently a customer was having issues printing invoices from Quickbooks. Actually invoices wouldn’t print at all, however they could print everything else from Quickbooks. After trying everything I could think of short of doing a complete reinstall, I discovered this easy fix.

# Open My Computer or Windows Explorer and navigate to the correct directory below for your version or QuickBooks.
# For QuickBooks 2007: Windows XP – C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Intuit\QuickBooks 2007
# For QuickBooks 2007: Windows Vista – C:\ProgramData\Intuit\QuickBooks 2007
# For QuickBooks 2006 and earlier: C:\Program Files\Intuit\[QuickBooks Version]

1. Locate the QBPRINT.QBP file and delete it. (Note: this file may be hidden by default.)
2. Open QuickBooks.
3. Click the File menu and select Printer Setup.
4. Click any one of the transactions in the Form Name drop-down and click OK. This will re-create the QBPRINT.QBP file. (This does not have to be done for each transaction.)
5. Open and print the transaction that was having problems.

This worked like a charm for me, hope it works for you as well.

Does the above screenshot look familiar? The problem is quite frustrating, as multiple taskeng.exe processes will start and then never end. This results in a huge number of taskeng.exe processes running simultaneously as the about screenshot shows which over time drastically reduces system performance. You may also get the following error message when you start Task Scheduler.

The task image is corrupt or has been tampered with. User_Feed_Synchronization

Fortunately there is a simple solution for Windows Vista thanks to NickDownUnder:

1. Go to the start menu.
2. Type task scheduler and press enter.
3. Press continue on the UAC popup.
4. In the left pane of task scheduler, underneath Task Scheduler Local, right-click on Task Scheduler Library.
5. In the View submenu, make sure the Show Hidden Tasks option is checked.
6. Widen the Name column in the center pane. The hidden task that is likely at fault has a name that starts with User_Feed_Synchronization, followed by a dash and a bunch of digits inside a curly brace.
7. Select that task in the middle pane by clicking on its name.
8. To verify that this scheduled task is creating all those taskeng.exe processes, select the History tab in the middle pane near the middle of the screen. If you expand out the Level and Date and Time Columns, you should see a bunch of errors and date and times that are 5 minutes apart. If that’s the case, then this task is the problem.
9. On the rightmost pane, select Disable.
10. There may be more than one scheduled task like this, so you’d need to disable any or all that were causing problems.
11. Restart your computer.