It’s admission time. I still run the financial side of my business on Quicken 2002 and yes, it really is 16 years old. It does what I need and is reliable. Over the years I’ve developed various handy Python scripts for manipulating its QIF file format (more about those another time) so I’m quite invested in it. Quicken apparently stopped support in the UK in 2005 but I didn’t notice. Unfortunately this means that upgrading to a newer version is next to impossible, so this one just soldiers on. One day I’m sure I’ll be forced to get hip with the kids and let my accounts float off in to the cloud, but I’m not looking forward to it.

At the end of last week, Quicken 2002 blotted its copy book by refusing to print invoices any more. This would have a detrimental effect on my business’s turnover, so it needed fixing. It wouldn’t even show the setup dialog any more. It was tricky to sort out, so I’m noting it here in case anyone else has this problem.

I was all ready to blame the problem on last week’s Windows 10 update, but a bit of digging on the web revealed that such problems can be caused by the WPR.INI file. This link: https://www.quicken.com/support/printer-setup-window-wont-open indicates that it should live in C:\ProgramData\Intuit\Quicken\Config, but my system doesn’t have that folder. There were WPR.DAT and WPR.INI files in C:\Program Files (x86)\QUICKENW but moving, renaming or deleting them had precisely no effect at all.

To find the instances of the file that Quicken was actually using, I brought the very handy Process Monitor in to action. This tool lets you see all the file and registry accesses being performed by a process. Setting a filter for the process named “QW.EXE” and then watching the log while I opened the print setup dialog box caught it red-handed.

The file was actually in C:\Users\cmj\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\QUICKENW\WPR.DAT. Why didn’t I guess?

The file was nearly quarter of a megabyte in size, which seems awfully large for some printer settings. After taking a backup copy, I deleted it and re-ran Quicken. Joy! The printer setup dialog box opened again and I was able to select a printer and thence print invoices. The creaky old application lives to account for another day.