Archive for QuickBooks

QuickBooks Pro 2016 Fails to Open Company File in Multi User Mode

One of my customers has been running QuickBooks Pro 2016 with no issue in multi user mode since we upgraded to it in January. Server is SBS 2011 (Windows 2008 R2).

Yesterday we were putting in a new router and VOIP phone system. We had an issue with Exchange receiving email after the new router was in place. I ran the “Fix My Network” and then rebooted the server. Meanwhile the tech working on the phones found where he had to make a change to the firewall to open port 25.

Long story short, we did some minor things to the server. But an hour later the customer could not open QuickBooks in multi-user mode, although it did work in single user mode.

That pointed to an issue with the Database Manager Service for 2016 (QuickBooksDB26). Sure enough, the service was not running.

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And when I attempted to restart it manually, it displayed the “started and then stopped” error message:

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I checked to make sure that firewall rules on the server were correct. I even attempted to re-scan using the the QuickBooks Database Server Manager, but it also just told me that the service was not running.

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Most solutions to fix this problem centered around uninstalling and reinstalling the QuickBooks Manager service, which I was not keen on doing.

I kept searching, and then found this solution in the Intuit forum that fixed the issue for my customer:

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Hope this helps you!

Defrag QuickBooks Company File to Improve Performance

One of my customers is running QuickBooks in a manufacturing environment. Their QB company file had grown to over 900MB in size! Many of their regular reports were taking over 5 minutes to load, and one large transaction report was taking 15-20 minutes to load.

We switched the QB company file to single user mode. We then ran Microsoft’s SysInternal Contig utility on it (using the –a option for analysis only) and found that the company file was heavily fragmented — 6,678 fragments to be exact!

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After making a backup of the company file, we then ran the Contig utility and it reduced the number of fragments from 6,678 to 1,555. It took the utility about ten minutes to complete. A second pass of Contig then took it down to 1 fragment!

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The result?

According to the customer, the 15-20 minute transaction report ran in 4-5 minutes. and the regular 5 minute reports completed almost instantly.

Quickbooks dbdata11.dll and Vipre/MAV

Friday morning (6-26-2015) I started receiving calls from several of my customers saying that they could not run Quickbooks, and that they were getting an alert that the file “dbdata11.dll” has been quarantined.

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With the help of other members of The ASCII Group, we quickly determined that it was a false positive due to a bad definition file update from Vipre (or the RMM version called MAV).

Soon after, MAXFocus (previously GFI) sent out a service status alert of the issue, and that it had been resolved with definition version 41468 and above. It was recommended to add the file (dbdata11.dll) to the Vipre/MAV exception list, before updating systems with the newer definition file.

Note: make an exception only for the file, and not the folder and file, as the folder name is randomly generated by QuickBooks.

That should have been it. Right? … Wrong!

I received a call from one of my users saying that one of their systems with QuickBooks installed on it had locked up. At about the same time they reported this issue, I received an email alert from the RMM service I use saying that the C: drive of this system had dropped to below 20% free space.

Once we got the system rebooted, I logged in and discovered that there 44,175 folder taking up nearly 62GB of disk space. The location of these folders were in C:\Users\QBDataServiceUser22\appdata\local\temp. Each of these folders contained a single file: dbdata11.dll.

It turns out that every time Vipre/MAV quarantined this file, QuickBooks created a new temp folder with the same file!

So once I had the A/V definition file updated, and we rebooted the system, I went in and safely deleted all 44,175 folders! 

What a fun way to spend a Friday!