SOLVED: Quickbooks 2011 Freezing/Locking Up on Reconciliation & Emailing

We use Quickbooks for our accounting here at Chickenlip, and have a number of customers that do the same. Within the span of a week, we encountered the same issue at a client site as well as internally. It was pretty tricky to figure out the solution, so I’ll post it here for reference down the road if it occurs again.

Tech Details:

• Software: Quickbooks 2011 R5
• Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit (one PC was Home Premium, the other was Professional)
• RAM: 4 GB (on both PC’s)
• Hard Drive: Lots of space available

The issue:

• Saving a reconciliation would lock up the program. Force terminating the program worked and the reconciliation was saved correctly. Running the “Previous Reconciliation Report” (Reports > Banking > Previous Reconciliation) showed the data correctly.
• Emailing invoices/statements/etc., would fail either by locking up the PC or showing an error message about the Quickbooks printer.
• From investigation this problem occurs due to issues with the Quickbooks PDF Converter (aka “Amyuni Document Converter 300”) and corrupt/incorrect settings on installation.

Resolution:

• Exit Quickbooks. If you’re running in a multi-user environment, ensure that all other users are logged out of Quickbooks before proceeding.
• Run the Intuit PDF Fix utility to reset the printer settings & printer spool on the PC. The tool can be downloaded from this URL (active as of July 5, 2011): http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/Articles/SLN40733
• Try Quickbooks again and see if the issue is resolved. If not, keep reading.
• Go to Start > Devices and Printers
• Right click “QuickBooks PDF Converter”, and click on “Printer Properties” (not properties)
• Click into the “Ports” tab, place a checkmark next to the “NUL:” port.
• Click into the “Advanced” tab
  • Select “ Spool print documents so program finishes printing faster” radio button
  • Select “ Start printing immediately” radio button
  • Select “Print directly to the printer” radio button
• Click “Apply”, then “OK”
• Restart the computer.

At this point, the problem was solved for both PC’s that were having issues. If you’re still encountering problems, let us know in the comments.