Quicken Deluxe 2009 hangs "connecting" for stock quotes

Posted by JimH on May 13, 2009, 8:35 pm

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I've been having a problem for several months with Quicken when I try to
download stock quotes. I'm currently running Deluxe 2009, but the
problem goes back a to a time before I upgraded to this version.

When I initiate a quotes download, the "Quicken One Step Update "pop-up
window appears with the word "Connecting...", and the animation runs. It
does not proceed from there. I've left it for a long time, and seen no
change. If I press the "Stop Update" button the check mark appears next
to "Download quotes....", but the pop-up window will not close, and
cannot be moved. At that point, I have to bring up the Windows Task
Manager, and kill the qw.exe process.

I can start the program over, and it will often work properly.
Sometimes, I have to kill the process 2 or 3 times before it is
successful. Once it works one time, it will continue to work, but if I
leave the program active for an extended time period, it will sometimes
fail again. In the short time that I've been writing this post, I've had
it work about a half dozen times, and fail 3-4 times. Each time having
to kill the program to recover from a failure. Then, after restart it
works fine again.

If I turn off the quotes selection, then One Step Update is able to
contact my banks, and update my accounts with no problems. It only ever
fails on stock quotes. For a while, I removed quotes from OSU, and had
no failures for days. I still saw failures when I initiated a request
for quotes.

For reference, this is a Windows XP system with all MS updates, and all
the latest drivers. The system has been rock solid for the two years
I've had it. My firewall is Zone Alarm, and my AV program is AVG Free.
I've tried turning off the firewall, but it made no difference. I did
have the failure on Quicken 2006 before installing 2009, so reinstall
made no difference either. Q2006 did download perfectly for a long time
before this problem showed up.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jim

Posted by John Pollard on May 13, 2009, 8:45 pm

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JimH wrote:

> I've been having a problem for several months with Quicken when I try

> to download stock quotes. I'm currently running Deluxe 2009, but the

> problem goes back a to a time before I upgraded to this version.

> When I initiate a quotes download, the "Quicken One Step Update

> "pop-up window appears with the word "Connecting...", and the

> animation runs. It does not proceed from there. I've left it for a

> long time, and seen no change. If I press the "Stop Update" button

> the check mark appears next to "Download quotes....", but the pop-up

> window will not close, and cannot be moved. At that point, I have to

> bring up the Windows Task Manager, and kill the qw.exe process.

> I can start the program over, and it will often work properly.

> Sometimes, I have to kill the process 2 or 3 times before it is

> successful. Once it works one time, it will continue to work, but if I

> leave the program active for an extended time period, it will

> sometimes fail again. In the short time that I've been writing this

> post, I've had it work about a half dozen times, and fail 3-4 times.

> Each time having to kill the program to recover from a failure. Then,

> after restart it works fine again.

> If I turn off the quotes selection, then One Step Update is able to

> contact my banks, and update my accounts with no problems. It only

> ever fails on stock quotes. For a while, I removed quotes from OSU,

> and had no failures for days. I still saw failures when I initiated a

> request for quotes.

> For reference, this is a Windows XP system with all MS updates, and

> all the latest drivers. The system has been rock solid for the two

> years I've had it. My firewall is Zone Alarm, and my AV program is

> AVG Free. I've tried turning off the firewall, but it made no

> difference. I did have the failure on Quicken 2006 before installing

> 2009, so reinstall made no difference either. Q2006 did download

> perfectly for a long time before this problem showed up.

> Any ideas?

Perhaps price history corruption. Easy enough to check.

Rename QDATA.QPH (where QDATA is the name of your Quicken data). Do a One
Step Update. Do an Historical Price update (you didn't mention whether
those have been failing). Test as much as you did while composing your
post.

If you don't experience any more hangs, chances are your price history was
corrupted.

There are several ways to recover price history; if you need to know them,
post back.

--

John Pollard

Posted by JimH on May 14, 2009, 2:33 pm

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John Pollard wrote:

> Perhaps price history corruption. Easy enough to check.

> Rename QDATA.QPH (where QDATA is the name of your Quicken data). Do a One

> Step Update. Do an Historical Price update (you didn't mention whether

> those have been failing). Test as much as you did while composing your

> post.

> If you don't experience any more hangs, chances are your price history was

> corrupted.

> There are several ways to recover price history; if you need to know them,

> post back.

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try, but it did not resolve the
problem.

I renamed the qph file to QDATA.qph_old. Then opened Quicken. It created
an empty file. The historical price update worked once, but failed on
another try. I restored the original price history, in order to recover
prices on other types of investments like coins and savings bonds. So,
I'm back where I was.

Posted by John Pollard on May 14, 2009, 4:54 pm

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JimH wrote:

> John Pollard wrote:

>> Perhaps price history corruption. Easy enough to check.

>> Rename QDATA.QPH (where QDATA is the name of your Quicken data). Do

>> a One Step Update. Do an Historical Price update (you didn't

>> mention whether those have been failing). Test as much as you did

>> while composing your post.

>> If you don't experience any more hangs, chances are your price

>> history was corrupted.

>> There are several ways to recover price history; if you need to know

>> them, post back.

> Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try, but it did not resolve the

> problem.

> I renamed the qph file to QDATA.qph_old. Then opened Quicken. It

> created an empty file. The historical price update worked once, but

> failed on another try. I restored the original price history, in

> order to recover prices on other types of investments like coins and

> savings bonds. So, I'm back where I was.

Maybe there's a problem with one or more of the securities Quicken is
trying to get prices for.

You might try excluding securities from the One Step Update quote download
... one by one. See if at some point, the OSU works ok.

--

John Pollard

Posted by JimH on May 17, 2009, 2:00 pm

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John Pollard wrote:

> Maybe there's a problem with one or more of the securities Quicken is

> trying to get prices for.

> You might try excluding securities from the One Step Update quote download

> ... one by one. See if at some point, the OSU works ok.

I decided to go ahead with the deletion of the price history. I used a
tool I found on the Internet (QPH File Processor) to export my price
history to a CSV file. It found several errors in the old file. I then
renamed my QPH file, and imported the prices from the CSV file. I
manually added prices for the dates when I bought the other assets. That
reduced my QPH file by a few meg.

BTW: I saw another discussion here about QPH and cost basis. Even with
an empty QPH file, the cost basis was correct for all assets. That is
apparently established from the purchase information alone, without
using the QPH data. That is what I would have expected.

I am still seeing connection failures. I even had one failure when
manually downloading a price history for one security.

Since it fails during the "connecting" stage, as opposed to the
"requesting" stage, I'm still leaning to a communication problem with
the server. Another possible clue was that this started shortly after
Intuit changed their quote servers.

I'm going to try using Ethereal, or some other network sniffer to see if
I can trace a failure, and see what is happening on the network. It
sounds like more fun than Sudoku anyway.

--
Jim