Quicken Deluxe 2009 hangs "connecting" for stock quotes

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.

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

I have had a similar problem with Quicken 2007 Deluxe(started couple of months ago) Quicken would not download any updates, stock quotes, IRA accounts, or credit card accounts. I had to stop the update, exit Quicken and like you use the Task Manager to kill the Quicken application. Most times no amount of fiddling would get the OSU to work. On occasion if I waited long enough to try again it would work but then.... I looked at my DNS cache (go to command prompt and enter: ipconfig/displaydns) (after a failure to connect) and did not see any domain names associated with Quicken. Tried flushing the cache (ipconfig/flushdns) which on occasion seemed to help the situation. But lately I have used: ipconfig/registerdns and each and every time this would clear the problem.

Still don't know what is the root cause as all of my other internet applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) do not have any apparent problems.

Marty

JimH wrote:

Marty,

1) have you tried ANY of the QPH repair methods described above?

2) can you access the net VIA QUICKEN for any function? If not, it could be a firewall issue.

3) is your OSU using Direct Connect or EWC (or both)? For any Web Connect accounts, can you initiate a Web Connect from within Q?

db

Hmm.. ipconfig/registerdns, eh?

OK. Not that I post around here often, but I've got this basic paranoia about the net. And I read about the various hacks and such on the net; it's kind of like reading about auto crashes in the newspapers.

The key words that ups and hits me: DNS hijacking. From what I understand, with a properly (mis)configured DNS server, it's possible for the Bad Guys to redirect packets destined for Point A to go to Point B, instead. Most of the time said packets then get further redirected to Point A, making the situation appear normal, but at some time or other they make their strike.

When this first came out there were warnings that many ISPs, small and large, had vulnerable DNS servers. And there're still people running around trying to secure the DNS infrastructure; again, I'm a noob, but the words I keep on hearing are "everybody needs to move to DNSSEC, ASAP!"

Supposedly a great many DNS servers have been fixed. But, given the size of the net at large and the (in)competence of server administrators, one never knows...

And it's possible that there's no hacks, but your local DNS server Is Having Its Problems. In which case it's your ISP, or one of their upstream DNS servers that's the problem. (What's the phrase: Do Not Attribute to Malice That Which Is Adequately Explained by Stupidity.)

As a relatively harmless experiment, I'd suggest changing your DNS server to opendns.com. By default, if you're using the typical home router/PC setup, the default DNS server is retrieved from your local ISP's DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) server. If you're running a router (normal for those not using dial-up) the router gets those numbers, then runs its own DHCP server, which PCs hooking up to your in-house LAN use to get _their_ IP addresses, gateway numbers, and DNS server numbers. One can override the business about a dynamic DNS server in either the PC or in the router; if you change from dynamic to static DNS, it just means that your PC looks up ip addresses from the static DNS server, rather than your ISP's DNS server.

Opendns.com, which, while I do use, I am in no other way associated with, supports their DNS severs by advertising when (1) somebody fumble fingers a web address and (2) when the web address requested is an Evil, Bad Place (they have helpers on this), and they block you from a Place To Which You Really Do Not Want To Go To. The Russian Business Network, if ill repute, hates these guys. When they do their redirect, they display a rather sparse web page with a list web sites that they think you might actually be going to and some relatively unobtrusive ads on the side. I haven't been hit by a, "Do Not Go Here!" redirect yet, but, on the other hand, I _am_ a web paranoid.

In any case, the cognizenti over at dslreports state that opendns is often faster than ISP's DNS servers and seems to fall down a lot less. And, at least up to now, they haven't found any evil with these guys, either. Instructions on how to change your PC's or router's DNS settings are on their web site.

I'd be _very_ curious to see if that fixes your (plural) problem. Along with (fitting in with my standard paranoia) a virus and malware scan.

And if nothing changes, it's easy enough to change your selection of DNS servers back to the default.

Ken

Thanks for the info.

I do not use DHCP. I manually set up ALL my IP address on my network and use my router as my DNS server (which gets it info from the Fairpoint server). If I was having problems with other applications I would suspect the DNS, but the only application that is having this with trouble is Quicken. All of my computers are connecting to the net just fine. I did us Opendns for a time but (and I can't remember the reason offhand stopped). It was doing something that I found irritating (I may try using it again and see if it improves Quicken performance) so went back to using my router address for my DNS.

No virus or malware on my systems, the wife and I are very careful what and where we go on the net. I use the paid AVG security suite and am very happy with its performance. It has trapped a few (count on one hand) malware and virus attempts on my system over the past few years. Been on the Internet for close to 20 years (before there was widespread use) and have been lucky enough to only have one malware infection and that was because I connected (via dialup) before installing Zone Alarm firewall. I will never do that again! :-)

Again, thanks for the info.

Marty

Ken and Jane Becker wrote: