I sat down tonight to get ready to do my taxes for 2011 and started installing my copy of Intuit’s TurboTax for the 2011 tax year. The software installed just fine, went off without a hitch, the problem was when I actually tried to launch the software, it just loads the splash screen and then disappears. Well, anytime a piece of software does something like this to me I see it as a personal challenge and I must say that this challenge got the best of me, I cannot for the life of me figure out what to make this work. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no virus scanner and as administrator to no avail and I have downloaded their latest updates to the software and that didn’t phase it. They have a long list of things that you can try but none of these items seem to work. I was finally able to get it installed on a Windows XP Virtual PC that I had and it installed without a hitch. I have noticed that several users of TurboTax are complaining out there about this problem, that it could have been going on for 2 years now although my last years copy of TurboTax installed without a hitch so I have no idea what they have changed this year. I did notice that they depend on the .net runtimes so I thought that was kinda cool that a large software product uses .net.
The big problem here is that the software didn’t report anything back to me, the user. I would have appreciated an error code, something, anything, instead I had nothing to go on. I had to just go off to google and start doing random searches and hope I could land on something that could help me, but I found very little. If you know of a fix out there, please comment on this post and we can hopefully help other poor souls that are in this predicament.
