OL-297 error that is so far unsolvable...

I have been using Quicken 2004 Premier (Release 5) for ~2 years now, and it has more or less worked.

I have now hit a problem that has wasted hours and is so far unsolvable: I am now getting constant OL-297 errors from all my financial institutions (FIs).

Everything in my system was working fine until this saturday (2005/7/16): I could do one step update, and all my FIs would download, and online bill pay via my bank (Commerce Bank) worked fine. I know that my system last worked around wednesday or thursday of that week.

Then, on saturday, one step update failed for my citicards mastercard account with an OL-297-A error. Oddly, I was still able to download info from at least a couple of my other FIs on that first attempt. Then, when I tried one step update again, all the other FIs began to fail with the same error (OL-297-A) that had worked the first time; it is almost as if the citi failure caused or reflected some change that occurred at that moment.

I have called all of my FI tech support people, and all are clueless people who read from scripts and tell me the same solutions; nothing they say has worked.

I have searched the web and found an intuit article on this:

went thru evey step listed on there, and still get the error. Oddly enough, immediately after I did the step which called for the registry fix (run winreg.exe), I WAS able to download info from my brokerage account using web connect (this is my one account that does not support direct connect, and I have always had to do web connect for it instead of using one step update). This brokerage account gave me an OL-297-B error right before I ran winreg.exe, then after running winreg.exe it allowed web connect to work once, and then I tried doing one step update for all other FIs and it failed again, then I went and tried web connect with the brokerage account and now all subsequent attempts again fail with an OL-297-B. This is strange behavior.

Doing some more web searching reveals that another problem might be with all of my FIs branding and profiles:

going thru all of my FIs, I was told that every one of themneeds its branding and profile updated. I clicked Refresh for all of them, and then tried a one step update, which is crucial, as hitting Refresh apparently does noting but set an internal flag: `0001682&tstart=0&start=-1Unfortunately, that seemed to do nothing: not only did I get no newtransactions to download, but when I go back to the online center I seethat all of my FIs are still labeled as needing their branding andprofile to be updated. I am aware of this extensive forum discussion concerning this error here: 0000062but nothing in there was suggested beyond what I have stated above.One exception: that thread mentions to try rebooting into safe modewith networking and then retry everything. I did this, but quickencould not be launched from my start menu: nothing happened at all, noerror message or anything. Searching thru C:\Program Files\Quickenseemed to reveal that the program qw.exe is the launcher program, anddouble clicking on that seemed to start it initially but then an errordialog came up so I could never test it in safe mode.

Some more possibly relevant facts:

--here are some entries from my CONNLOG.txt file: 20050720 20:28:57: QFN: Beginning send to

20050720 20:28:57: ***QFN kQFFinished: returns -2079784143 20050720 20:28:57: Cannot find error string for -2079784143, pleasecheck IC TechNotes QuickBase 20050720 20:28:57: QFN: End send to netstatus36

20050720 20:28:57: 20050720 22:13:37: QFN: Beginning send to 20050720 22:13:37: ***QFN kQFFinished: returns -2079784143 20050720 22:13:37: Cannot find error string for -2079784143, pleasecheck IC TechNotes QuickBase 20050720 22:13:38: QFN: End send to netstatus 36 Hmm, anything significant about that -2079784143???

--with one of my FIs (Commerce Bank), I was told when talking to one of their tech support people to try disabling online access in quicken and reenabling it. I succeeded eventually in disabling online acces, but now cannot reenable it (a dialog box pops up with, you guessed it, and OL-297-A error).

--I validated my quicken file; it found about 10 errors (in my .qel file?) that all seemed fairly minor, and it was able to fix everything.

--my machine is a win xp sp2 box which has all the latest patches (e.g. up to and including the july security update: I am pretty sure that quicken still seemed to work immediately after doing that last update)

--I have no antivirus software running

--I have always had windows firewall turned off (my pc sits behind a linksys wr54g router, which has its own hardware firewall; this router last had its firmware upgraded a couple of months ago, and I do not recall it ever causing a problem with any of my programs).

--nothing on my system changed that I know of in the last week

I am wits end here and desperately need good tech help.

Please respond!