On Friday morning, I added a new account to Quicken Premier 2006 (R4). I made a mistake about the customer ID, using the account number instead of my ID. When I tried to download transactions into the account, it failed, and posted an error message. Immediately after closing the error pop-up, Quicken crashed back to the desktop, with no message. I've seen that happened before, on occasions, so I just restarted it. I entered my password, and it came back up. As soon as I clicked on anything inside the Quicken window, it crashed again. I tried uninstall, and reinstall, but it still crashed. I went back to a previous backup, and still it crashed.
Finally, I decided to try Intuit's support, using chat. I was connected with "Christina" who worked with me for over two hours. WE reinstalled it again, and tried using older backups from the CD and from the Quicken backup folder. She seemed knowledgeable, but was not effective in resolving the problem. I was accidentally disconnected, and when I reconnected, "Sandy" was either unwilling, or unable to reconnect me with Christina. Sandy was not so helpful. She immediately wanted me to reboot. When I explained that I had already rebooted 4 times, she suggested uninstalling, and reinstalling Quicken in safe mode. It was apparent that she wanted me to do anything that would make me disconnect, so she could be rid of me. I finally just said goodbye, and closed the chat window.
I also have Quicken installed on my wifes laptop computer, so I took the latest backup there. On her computer, I was able to download transactions, and add the account that had started this mess. Once it was all up to date, I backed up the data from her computer.
On my computer, I removed Quicken again. I also searched for any files that had been updated that day. I found a lot of other Quicken files in folders inside of "c:\Documents and settings\all users\application data\Intuit\Quicken" that had also been modified. I removed all of those folders. I didn't want to mess with the registry if I could avoid it, so I left it alone, with a plan to go through that if these steps didn't work. I reinstalled Quicken, but didn't let it install update R4. Voila. It was able to load the backed up data, and worked without problem. I've since installed R4, and it continues to work.
I can't say for sure what fixed it, or even what was broken, but I expect someone else may hit this nasty little bug, so hopefully, this information will help. Intuit support certainly didn't.
Regards, Jim