Thursday, June 2, 2011

QuickBooks on Windows 7 - Why 2 icons when running?

I finally decided to upgrade my QuickBooks to a version that is 'officially' supported on Windows 7. I bought QuickBooks Pro 2011. Don't get me started on the registration process... maybe another article.

This issue
For now, I was disappointed by the fact that this version, which is officially supported on Windows 7, does not behave on the Taskbar as well as the 2006 version (which is not officially supported) that I had to manually install (see old post). Unlike every other program that I currently have a Taskbar shortcut for, when I open QuickBooks from the Taskbar icon, it creates another icon to let me know that it is running. It is supposed to use the same icon and thus save space on the Taskbar but it doesn't.

The Fix
The fix is pretty easy. If you look at the properties of the shortcut, it points to an executable file QBW32Pro.exe. But if you look in the Task Manager when QB is running, you will see that the file QBW32.exe is actually running. So, presumably, when QBW32Pro.exe is launched, it does something and eventually launches QBW32.exe. What that something is, I don't know. But, knowing QuickBooks, it is probably something I don't care about. Possibilites: looking to see if an instance is already running, checking to see if there are multiple versions of the program installed or possibly just a way of enforcing the particular version. So, I just browsed to the folder where the QBW32.exe lives (C:\Program Files\Intuit\QuickBooks 2011 for me) and created a TaskBar shortcut for that file and removed the one for QBW32Pro.exe. It works fine. Whatever QBW32Pro.exe is doing before it launches QBW32.exe doesn't seem to be necessary on my machine. Your results may vary.

5 comments:

Jerry said...

Yeah. Quickbooks is full of fun. . . Just had some interesting behavior on a network install on 2 stations. Same install, same disk, machine 2 complained that the company file that was upgraded on machine 1 must have been a newer version! Updated both with the latest patches from the web and fixed that.

Anonymous said...

THANKS, that was bugging me.

Anonymous said...

So much better, thank you! Saves me the trouble of accidentally clicking on the pinned shortcut when QB was already open, causing headaches.

Anonymous said...

I have QB15 on Win8.1 and this is STILL a problem. Your fix helped. Many thanks!

Anonymous said...

I have QB16 on Win10 and this is STILL a problem. Your fix helped. It had been really annoying - many thanks!