Quicken 2004 crashes at startup

A little more info: I normally run as a limited user under Windows. With the limited user, if I run Quicken it aborts immediately. With an admin user, I can run Quicken and open my account file.

So it's got to be some preference file or registry setting that Quicken uses with my normal user. I've tried moving the files that I can locate out of the way, but if anyone has any suggestions for files to move I'd appreciate it.

I suppose worst case is I could probably set up yet another limited user and run Quicken from there but that seems kind of ridiculous.

Even more detail: it looks like Quicken has decided that it no longer wants to run from a limited user account. I tried a separate limited user account, and that didn't work either. If I use the "runas" command from my standard account and run as administrator, it works fine.

Anyone have any ideas why, after running for many months as a limited user, Quicken would die unless it was run with admin priveledges?

I'm not an expert on this topic, but it seems to be very similar to one discussed here many times wherein a user installs Q under a limited user account and then Q doesn't run properly. You might try completely uninstalling Q, reinstalling Q from your admin account, then running as a limited user. Q "builds" a number of links and such that can only be accessed correctly from an admin account and aren't part of your data files. Without these features Q just wont even start. Why your situation changed all of a sudden is way beyond my ken.

David Parker

If op believes that the Quicken installation is corrupted, I think the best chance of recovering from that would be to uninstall Quicken, temporarily give the limited user Admin priveledges, install Quicken as the limited user with admin priveledges, then revert the limited user to limited priveledges. To the extent that this approach works, I think it only works for the limited user that did the install; other limited users will probably not benefit.

One bit of followup: when I originally installed Quicken, the account I installed under was an admin account. Later on I added a separate account for administration, and changed my original account to a limited account. What is odd is that Quicken has worked fine for a number of months after that.

I haven't decided whether I'll go the "uninstall / reinstall" route or not. I believe Quicken 2004 required some sort of activation and I would hate to get into a state where I couldn't run Quicken at all.

I don't think this is true.