Quicken Scrubber Tool

nmestanas

Sometimes, you need to uninstall and reinstall a program to address an issue. My recent experience showed that uninstalling Quicken left "orphaned" folders/files and registry keys.

Adobe offers an Acrobat scrubbing tool to ensure all traces of Acrobat (Pro and Reader) are wiped clean prior to an install to eliminate any "conflict" from past settings or old files. Microsoft also offers a scrubbing tool for Office. Perhaps Quicken should offer one as well to ensure that those of us that have used Quicken for years, can have confidence that an uninstall does, in fact, completely removes all previous traces of the application.

After following several suggestions that failed to fix my issue, I uninstalled then reinstalled Quicken and the issue still persisted. Then I did another uninstall and started searching my local drive for anything named "quicken" and discovered folders and files remaining in the my AppData and ProgramData folders. I manually deleted these. I then searched though the Windows registry and found many Keys, Values and Data still linked to Quicken. Again, I manually deleted these, then rebooted my PC. I did a fresh Quicken install and updated with the latest patch. Then I restored my Qdata file, re-authorized my financial institutions and the issue was resolved.

I believe my prior uninstall/reinstall did not resolve the issue due to some conflict resulting from the "leftover" files and settings. Only once i purged them from my system, did the new install work properly. The locations of the files and keys are in "protected" area of Windows where only someone with knowledge and experience should tread. A scrubbing tool would allow all users to clean their drive properly without risk of corrupting key components of Windows. This would be help Customer Support in eliminating a potential contributor to ongoing issues with customer installs.

At this time, I am on WIn11 Pro 23H2, an Quicken for Windows R58.14

RalphC

I suggest that you investigate the Revo uninstaller for your uninstallation procedures. The freeware version will do what you are asking. It's my goto uninstaller.

Uninstall Software, Remove programs easily - Revo Uninstaller Pro

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20453112#Comment_20453112

Does it remove the INI files?

I have found that when a simple uninstall doesn't work with Quicken it is usually due to the INI files having problems and removing them solves the problem. Quicken doesn't really use the registry that much and for a while now Quicken Subscription's uninstall has included what they used to call "QCleanUI", so it does remove the most critical registry settings.

BK

I support this.

@Chris_QPW

I still use the "QCleanUI" tool and in addition I created my own batch script to completely remove all residual files and folders. And I finish it up by cleaning the windows registry using CCleaner.

nmestanas

@BK I also used CCleaner to do the initial "purge" of the registry after the uninstall. I still found some remnants.

@Chris_QPW I found the QCleanUI tool on your site. I have it now for future use. Thanks!! The ProgramData/Quicken folder containing the quicken.ini (in the Config folder) was still there. I assumed this remained to ease the re-install along with the Documents/Quicken folder. I also found your post from Jun 2023 about the removal of the QCleanui tool. I switched to the Subscription Quicken once support for my previous (non-subscription) version ended. At the time (as best as I can recall) I simply "upgraded" to the new version. Perhaps some of the reg leys, etc. were remnants of the older Quicken?

I've been a Quicken user since the mid-late '90s (I recall). My current qdata file has transactions going back to 2002.

Chris_QPW

@nmestanas Unfortunately the version of QCleanUI I have on my site is out of date, so I'm not sure how effective it will be for Quicken Subscription. I just saved it and posted it for people using the older version of Quicken since Quicken Inc has removed that website.

Note what QCleanUI does is feed registry keys to MSIClean32 and what it feeds is the main uninstall key for a given year (or all of them if you have selected that). It is up to MSIClean32 to trace out the keys that go with that main key and remove them.

But they have said that Quicken Subscription's uninstall now runs it and should be the current version.

Note I voted for this Idea because I do believe that Quicken Inc should be providing a way to "totally wipeout" the "user settings" when requested, which is in fact more the INI files than the registry. In my experience it is the INI files that have the corruption in them more than the registry.

This could be done with a simple question in the uninstall. "Do you want to remove all of the user's settings to get a fresh start?".

Chris_QPW

BTW the old Intuit/Quicken Inc documentation on the use of QCleanUI was always wrong and they would never change it. You have to run QCleanUI before any uninstall of Quicken (and once run you might not have to run the Quicken uninstall because it will have already been run by MSIClean32).

It always stated that you should run the Quicken uninstall and then QCleanUI. If done that way it is useless because the uninstall removes that main uninstall key and when MSIClean32 finds it missing it does nothing.

This reminded me of something, that Quicken 2018, and Quicken Subscription are the "save version" and as such the uninstall registry key hasn't changed since Quicken 2018 and the QCleanUI version I have on my website includes the Quicken 2018 uninstall registry key. So, it should still be effective for Quicken Subscription (and I have my doubts that they are running QCleanUI at the right time in the Quicken Subscription uninstall based on their refusal to ever change the documentation on it).

As a test I just ran QCleanUI and sure enough it uninstalled Quicken Subscription.