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Windows Q2017: Freeze when downloading quotes/investment prices

Joseph Kesselman

New problem as of a week or so ago: If I let Quicken try to update "Quotes and investment information" it goes into a hard freeze, forcing me to kill the process to get out of it.

I tried the old trick of backing up and restoring, in the hopes that this would rebuild whatever data was damaged. No improvement.

There used to be a page with tips for recovering the Quicken Price History from an old backup, to avoid losing all that history... or at worst deleting the QPH and rebuilding just the most recent 5 years (which I *REALLY* don't want to do; I've got history going back to 1993).

I tried a Validate, and it seemed to lock up during that too. Haven't tried Super Validate; I'm not sure whether that would be less risk or more.

Pointers to what else I could try would be _GREATLY_ appreciated!

Quicken's been pretty solid for me up until now... but this is a nontrivial problem. Not as bad as damaging my account records would be, but I'd really like to get it fixed rather than (as I'm doing now) kluging around it by turning off that download.

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q_lurker

A few thing to try:
Restore a file from say 6-months ago and see if it will connect and download.
Create a new file for testing purposes with a limited number of securities and see if it will connect and download.
Both those would be looking to see it it might be your program installation rather than your data file.

Which version of QW2017 are you on? R15.15 came out a couple of weeks ago and could be a culprit. (I am suspicious of that release.)

How many securities on in your download list? You might try a very limited number - like two or three. (If you have a lot on your list, I'd make a backup or a copy so you don't lose the desired setup.)

Joseph Kesselman

Oddity: Backups from April onward are in a BACKUP directory. Backups before that are in the parent directory (where my QDF file was).

I do *not* have many securities. About eight (mostly mutual funds) plus wanting to download the four indexes for comparison.

Yeah, it looks like I got pushed onto R15.15. Is there a good way to roll back? Or is there any chance we could get a less suspicious build ASAP? (In your shoes I'd be tempted to push out 15.16 which is actually a rollback to 15.14, unless 15.15 had an absolutely critical fix.)

Joseph Kesselman

Oh, I also noticed that one of my mutual funds seems to have lost most of its history. I'm *definitely* going to have to try some older restores. That means losing all the hand-entered data on checks since that backup. GRRRRR. Might help to add ability to restore just selected accounts, keeping newer data for others... but undo the breakage first, please!

q_lurker

You can rebuild price history with resorting to a restore; BUT if some serious corruption got tossed in, the restore may be necessary to recover from that.

In my shoes? My shoes are the same as yours - bought and paid for by a Quicken user. Though I have avoided the R15.15 patch so far.

The only way I would no to roll back would be (somewhat simplified) - uninstall, reinstall from your original download or a new copy of that basic version without an internet connection so that the program does not auto-upgrade, then upgrade to R15.13 using alternate patches from a reputable third party site like QPW's site)

Although your symptoms are not obviously related to online banking, I'd be inclined to try these instructions: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/new-ol-1-b-error-when-updating-accounts-in-quick... Doesn't seem like that should hurt anything worse (he said from the bleachers).

Joseph Kesselman

For what it's worth -- I'm trying an Export to QXF, also in the "can't make things worse", just to see if that's able to negotiate past whatever the data issue is. It's currently sitting in the consistency check, "checking stock splits", and showing the same not-responding-to-UI-event-loop behavior. I'm going to let it cook for a while, but I'm not optimistic.

BTW, this indicates a design flaw in Quicken. Data processing should *never* make the UI stop responding to events; if it does, you aren't using tasks/threads properly. Oh well. Quicken is sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated.

Joseph Kesselman

Yeah, looks like the stock history is indeed the suspect for what got borked; it appears to have frozen in that checking stage. Sigh. Too much to hope that the check is smart enough to realize it can fail?

q_lurker

Correction: I meant to say above: "You can rebuild a price history WITHOUT resorting to a restore."

It should (obviously?) be "know to roll back" rather than "no".

Sorry if these caused any confusion.

q_lurker

My first line fix for an individual security price history problem is to change the ticker symbol to something else then change it back to the right symbol. Delete the "old" prices each time.

Quicken maintains the ticker related price history even if you delete the security. The ticker change process seems to delete all that saved history for the security being re-tickered. In some cases, that means it also deletes whatever glitch is in that section of that data. The glitches do not seem to get copied to the new ticker and thus not back to the old ticker as well.

If it is one or two known securities with troublesome price history info -like lost data - I would suggest that path.

mshiggins

From C. D. Bales:

Another way to recover price history:

https://getsatisfaction.com/quickenco...

Joseph Kesselman

I did uninstall/reinstall/upgrade _ONLY_ to 15.13. Moderately painless. (This is why I keep install files backed up darned near forever -- disk space is cheap compared to the alternatives.)

Haven't quite had the courage to try updating the securities again. Inclined to let that wait until I'm awake...

Joseph Kesselman

Hm. I just tried to download NASDAQ, and it looks like it's frozen again. So at least part of the damage appears to be in the history of the indexes.

Sigh. I don't hate computers. I just hate other programmers. When I don't love them.

Joseph Kesselman

Trying changing the symbol on one of my securities. Quicken isn't showing the circle "busy" cursor that it did on update freeze, but it's running at an unchanging 12.5% of my CPU and Not Responding to events, which is about what it was showing before. Hard to be sure if the disk activity is Q or something else, but it looketh ungood.

Joseph Kesselman

Occurred to me to try exporting a QXF. No soap; first thing it tries is to check consistency and stock splits, which gives me spinning-blue-lockup.

Joseph Kesselman

BTW, apologies for logging all of this in detail -- it helps me to "rubber duck" the problem, and it just might provoke other suggestions. Yes, I have an overcompensated writer's block.

Dropping the indexes from my securities list -- so I won't miss the fact that I can't update them. Strictly a cosmetic solution, I'm sure.

Considering trying the QPH recovery, on the "it's unlikely to make anything worse if I'm not working on the main data file" principle.

q_lurker

Have you ever confirmed that this is truly a data file problem as opposed to a program/program installation problem?

I had suggested early on to create a brand new file for checking purposes only - limited number of securities (including indexes). Make sure that file properly updates quotes. Perhaps even a download from a brokerage if applicable. If so, you can be more confident chasing data file issues.

Joseph Kesselman

I did reinstall Q and selectively upgrade to 15.13. And it seems to be updating current prices from my broker fine, though I am indeed missing price history on all of those.

OK, lemme try the stub datafile. Hang on...

Joseph Kesselman

Started a dummy datafile, with one savings account. Went to the Securities List. There was a long delay resolving the first symbol I entered. Thereafter it was OK ...

...Until I tried looking up one that I'd had in the past but which I know no longer exists (ILCIX, very early stock index fund, eventually got merged into another fund family with a different symbol). It's not locked up, it's not burning CPU, but it sits there spinning the circle until I hit backspace or otherwise tell it to look for something else.

Might be wise for me to delete that symbol, and a few like it, from my semi-recovered datafile. Quicken update *shouldn't* lock up when it can't resolve a symbol, but that's the kind of thing that I can easily see not getting tested.

Joseph Kesselman

(I can update quotes on the dummy file fine, BTW.)

Joseph Kesselman

Removed those symbols, selected only the remaining ones to download histories... Lockup.
I can do a binary search looking for which download is hiccuping, I suppose, but I'm not sure that tells me anything when I can't then go digging into the code.

Joseph Kesselman

Extracted the old history (from the end of last year), CSV-ified it.

Trying to import without clearing the old history first locks up badly enough that it interferes with delivery of events to OTHER windows.

I suspect trying to clear the history from within Quicken will have similar results.

More than half tempted to just try patching the extracted .QPH directly into a copy of the current data file and see if a miracle occurs. Not sure it can make matters worse.

Joseph Kesselman

Trying the resymbol-resymbol trick on SFRBFX, to try to drop the existing history, I lock up. (Worked for one of the others...)

Yeesh.
Yeah, looks like a direct transplant may be my best bet...

Joseph Kesselman

Made a fresh copy of my best file so far, naming it TRANSPLANT.QDF.

Used File > Operations > Validate twice, first to remove
price history, then to validate what was left. It found a bunch of stuff
it wanted to fix up, all 2012 or before -- OK, fine.

Went to Investing > Portfolio, File > File Import > Import security prices
Told it to read the -AllData.csv file I extracted from the .QPH from December's file.
After a minute or so, it said "Successfully imported 20210 prices."
Net worth shows as lower than before I started -- yeah, December's market prices, makes sense.

SAVE A COPY of this, before the universe implodes...

UPDATE -- still with "Download Quotes" turned off.
Net worth looks much more reasonable.
SAVE A COPY! (Paranoia is insufficient!)

Check Investing > Performance. It shows that correction to today's prices as occurring today; presumably that's because I don't have this year's prices yet.

Bite the bullet and enable "Download Quotes". Hit "Select Quotes" and make sure it's only looking at things with correct current ticker symbols. Punch "update now".

Investing > Performance > Growth of $10K ... still shows all the price change since December as happening now. So I didn't pick up this year's history, or it hasn't integrated it yet.

Still, that's a lot closer to correct.
Make this my official current working copy and BACK UP!

Yeesh. Whew. Sigh. Wow. Grumble. ... Shrug.

Back up early. Back up often. The data you save may be your own.

Joseph Kesselman

Couldn't transplant; 7zip didn't rebuild it in exactly the form Q was expecting. So...

Joseph Kesselman

I'm still afraid to upgrade to 15.15 again, though.

q_lurker

I am not sure what that means. I certainly would have expected your first download quotes action to pick up all of this years prices - last 30 days, end-of-week before that back for a year, end of month before that back to 5 years; that is per the historical data download. So you may be seeing something particular to the $10K chart. (A different topic?)

You might review the security prices you do have now to see their data points. You can do this for a collection of securities with the Portfolio views and the As-of date setting. The program should show the 'watch face' next to the price if the price shown is for a day prior to the As Of date; that is, if there is not a price for that security on that date. After backing up, you might try the Download Historical Prices for select securities, if needed.

Joseph Kesselman

Good points, thanks.

I've always found the growth-of-$10k chart problematic at best; it seems to be affected by purchases and sales even if they aren't reinvested dividends, meaning all it really represents is account balance history normalized to the starting date... Not what it claims to be. I've questioned this and gotten inadequate excuses. Oh well; not at all a critical function.

(The fact that IRR on the same data and dates yields different numbers in different displays bothers me more, but they're all close enough to use as a rough sanity check on my overall investment strategy. And I'm one of those who believes it's better not to try to dig much deeper; too much additional work and as likely to mislead as to help.)

Joseph Kesselman

Figured out what's missing: My 401k is in funds defined by that program, which do not (as far as I know) have their own ticker symbols. So recovering the year's stock histories does not recover the price-per-share of those investments.

Best thought I have is to try pulling the .QPH data from a more recent backup, and hope that the process of exporting that to CSV file and importing it from there won't cause the database to become tangled again. If it's really just a price history table, that *should* be safe.

Joseph Kesselman

Tried that. Perhaps because there are no ticker symbols, it didn't get me any additional price history info. Unless I can figure out how to fetch that for my 401k accounts, I may be stuck. Oh well. It's still a huge improvement over where I was a few days ago, and gives me a reasonable starting point for going forward.

q_lurker

Go back into your old Quicken file, assign a ticker to those funds. Then the QPH processor will be able to CSV those prices.

You'll also need to assign the same ticker in your newer file.

Joseph Kesselman

Ah. Clever solution!

... But may be more trouble than I want to go to, at this point.