QuickBooks 2010 and 2009 PDF Printer Problems with 64 Bit Systems
If you are using a 64 bit operating system and QuickBooks 2009 or 2010, you may run into some problems This article talks about how to resolve the problem.
Please note that this article relates to specific revisions/versions of the US editions of QuickBooks:
- QuickBooks 2010 R4 and later
- QuickBooks 2009 R10 and later
If you are using a 2007 or 2008 version of QuickBooks, or a 2009 version with revisions older than R10, then please refer to my previous article on QuickBooks problems on 64 bit Vista.
If you don’t know how to tell what “revision” you are running, please see this FAQ article .
This article was updated on 1/5/2010, and again on 1/12/2010
UPDATE 02/12/2010: QB 2009 R11 has been released to fix this problem, see the 2009 R11 article
UPDATE 04/20/2010: QB 2010 R6 has been released to fix this problem (see my article on this release).
UPDATE: See my article on QuickBooks 2011 and PDF drivers – the problem should be RESOLVED once and forall (if you upgrade).
QuickBooks PDF Driver
QuickBooks includes a PDF driver that it installs. This is used in a number of places in the program. If you are sending forms via email, the PDF driver creates the image of the form that is attached to the email. When you reconcile accounts (bank accounts, etc.), a copy of the reconciliation report is archived in PDF format. There is a save as PDF option in the File menu. In 32 bit systems it generally works quite well. Unfortunately, in 64 bit systems, Intuit runs into problems on occasion.
In the 2009 release of QuickBooks the driver didn’t work in 64 bit systems – this wasn’t fixed until the R7 release . In the 2010 release, it worked fine (at least it did in my system).
Recently, Intuit updated the PDF driver to a new version which unfortunately seems to be incompatible with 64 bit systems. This was updated in the 2009 R10 and 2009 R4 releases. The problems vary from installation to installation – and the problem can be very tricky. It doesn’t always show up. I had a hard time pinning this one down myself – the program would work fine, then I’d come back and find that it wasn’t working. These kinds of transient problems are very hard to catch in testing of releases, and are hard to fix.
The Problem
In my Windows 7 x64 system, the problem I most often came across was Could not print to printer.
Another common error is QuickBooks PDF Converter Activation Error –20. There are a variety of other errors that might pop up, all relate to performing some operation that invokes the PDF driver.
The Solution
Fortunately, Intuit discovered the problem and posted a temporary fix in Support Article 898690 .
The solution involves obtaining a DLL file (a program component file) from Intuit and installing it in the appropriate place. I can’t provide you with the DLL – you have to go to that support article and click on the download link. You will be asked to provide your email address and name, and they will email the link to the DLL to you very quickly.
I would like to point out (their initial article didn’t make this really clear) that you should only make this change if you have one of the revisions that are affected that I list above. If you make the change with an older revision – such as I accidentally did with a 2009 R8 test installation, you will get a different series of errors. So check your revision first before doing this.
The email message that contains the link to the DLL file will have specific instructions for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. I’ll illustrate the process here (and fill in a few blanks) using Windows 7 – the general process is the same in all three operating systems, the difference is finding the printer device in the Control Panel.
1. Log in to your Windows system as the administrative user.
2. Exit QuickBooks if you have it running.
3. Click the Windows (start) button and select the Control Panel.
4. Under Hardware and Sound click the lick for View devices and printers.
3. Locate the QuickBooks PDF Converter 3.0 icon.
Note that there may be several PDF icons if you have installed older products. In my Vista system, that I’ve used for several years, I saw three separate icons. Make sure you delete the 3.0 version.
In some cases in Windows 7 the 3.0 icon might be hidden. In one system the program only listed a 2.0 converter, which confused me at first. If I right clicked on the icon I noted that there were several options under the printing preferences menu option – it was showing that this icon represented both the 2.0 and the 3.0 driver, even though the icon only said it was for 2.0.
In this case, you can select the 2.0 icon and perform the next step, it works on the 3.0 driver.
5. Right click on the icon (the 3.0 icon, or the 2.0 icon if that is all you see) and select Remove Device.
6. Locate the qbwpr32.dll program file. The folder name varies with the version of QuickBooks you use. The path will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Intuit\product, where product will be something like QuickBooks 2009, QuickBooks 2009, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 9.0 or QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 10.0.
7. Right click on the file and rename it from qbwpr32.dll to qbwpr32.old.
8. Download the dll file from the link Intuit provides and place it in this folder.
9. Restart QuickBooks and see if the problem is solved. Note that you may see the error one more time, but if you then exit QuickBooks and try the operation a second time the error should not occur. In my Enterprise 10 installation the problem didn’t pop up that first try, but in my Enterprise 9 installation it did – and it cleared up the second time.
If you have both the 2009 and 2010 versions installed please note that you need to make the DLL file change in both directories for this to work properly.
Update on 1/5/2010: Some users have run into a problem after installing the new DLL file, getting a “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library” error. Intuit is investigating this. I don’t have this issue on MY system, but a few others have reported it. If you run into this you can delete the DLL file and rename the “OLD” file to the original name. I’ll post an update when we know what is going on
If That Doesn’t Work
This section was added on 1/12/2010.
Some people (as you can see from the comments below) have run into problems with the DLL solution. Some have found that they have slightly different problems than what are outlined here. Intuit is working on a further solution, and we’ll post information here when we find it.
If the DLL creates a worse problem than the one you started with, one simple fix is to delete that new DLL and rename the “old” one back to the original name. That puts you back to the place that you started at.
You can get a PDF printer driver (Adobe Acrobat is what I use, some people use “CutePDF” which I haven’t tried) and use that to print PDF documents as a normal printer, BUT that isn’t a full solution as you still can’t reconcile accounts, and you don’t get the email message created with the customer email address.
Some people have found that after deleting the PDF driver per the instructions above, a new PDF driver is not created automatically as it should. I’m not sure why this happens. But, here is a solution to try based on feedback from several users, as well as input from Sudhir Navalapakam of Intuit.
You can install the PDF converter from files in your QuickBooks folder. Go to C:\Program Files(x86)\Intuit\QuickBooks 2010 (the last folder will be QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 10.0 if you are using Enterprise).
Locate Install.exe, and run that file. This is the Amyuni PDF driver installer (Amyuni is the company that makes this program). Note that the installer is not “signed” so you may get a warning, this is OK).
This should create an Amyuni Document Converter icon in your printer section of the control panel. You can rename it to “QuickBooks PDF Converter 3.0″. Right click on it and select printer properties, and check to ake sure that it uses the “NUL:” port.
If for some reason the installer fails, which might happen for some people, you can use the add a printer wizard to add a printer from the control panel.
Select Add a local printer.
Select an existing port if NUL: exists, or you will have to create it.
Select the Amyuni driver.
Click Have Disk, and brows to the same folder as I specified above, to find the amyuni.inf file.
Make sure that you do NOT set this to be the “default” printer.
My thanks to Intuit employees Laura Messerschmitt and Sudhir Navalapakam for their assistance with this information.
Category: Program Updates, QB 2009, QB 2010, Vista and Windows 7
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Look for Charlie’s articles in the QuickBooks and Beyond blog, as well as his California Wildflower Hikes blog.
Connect with Charlie at Google
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Fred, you are persistent if you read through all these comments!
I’ve not had the “winmail.dat” problem show up on my system, so I don’t have a direct answer for that. You can find a lot of discussions about winmail.dat if you use Google. Essentially, it relates to an issue with your email program if you are using Outlook or a related program. Set your default outgoing email format to be plain text, not RTF. See if that works. Some users found that they had to do other changes in addition. But again, I’ve not tried this myself, as I haven’t run into the problem.
I had a conflict with the 2010 R6 release and Office 2010.
I installed Win 7 x64, the Office 2010 x32 (recommended by MS unless you have huge spread sheets). The Office 2010 install included OneNote. I then installed the QuickBooks. When I tried to email a PO I received the “Could not Print” error.
After a some trouble shooting I discovered the “Send to OneNote” virtual printer was using the nul: port and the QuickBooks printer was on LPT1.
I removed the OneNote printer and directed the QuickBooks printer to use the NUL: port. After restarting QuickBooks and the PC, I was able to send my PO.
Next I’m going to do a repair on the Office install to see if I can restore the OneNote printer without breaking QuickBooks.
I am absolutely livid with these people. They disabled my ability to email invoices in QB 2007 I spend $150 to “upgrade” to 2010 and the very feature that forced me to upgrade is not operational. I cannot send forms and cannot send my invoices.
This to me is sharp practice at best and in my view criminal stuff; and in any event completely beyond the pale. Why don’t they simply re-allow emails from QB 2007. OH yes, of course the master file is not in QB 2010 format (I did back it up of course).
ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. I have emailed my CPA for alternative suggestions and I plan to stop payment with my credit card company.
Hello Charlie,
I’ve read through most of this string — what a wild ride!! When I installed QB 2009 Pro on W7x64, it worked fine. When I recently fired it up to e-mail some invoices, I was prompted to update to R11 and I immediately had the Printer not Activated problem. This string seemed to die out about a month ago — are you aware of a clean fix that I can use?
Kerby, all I can say is that for ME, the 2009 R11 fix worked and continues to work: http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2010/02/quickbooks-2009-r11-update-fixes-pdf-printer-problems-with-64-bit-systems/
There are many people who seem to have ongoing problems, but it is not clear what exactly the issue is for those systems. There are a lot of issues with 64 bit Windows systems that are not directly related to QuickBooks, but that can cause the printer driver to go haywire.
I can’t say much about this, and it isn’t an answer that everyone will want, but I have high expectations that the 2011 product will resolve this once and forall, with a different approach.
I’m using Quickbooks Pro 2010 on a Windows 7 system. Checks printed fine until today. The check feeds through my printer, the printer sounds like it’s working, but nothing prints on the check. The Quickbooks support folks told me it was caused because I didn’t order my checks from Quicken! This can’t be the reason – my checks printed just fine until today? Any ideas?
Dale, that isn’t a PDF issue, so that is off-topic. Diagnosing problems like that is hard to do through comments in a blog like this.
I would first try printing to a different printer just to see if it is related to that one printer. The steps after that depend on the answer.
You may be better of posting this in the Intuit Community Forums, where you would have a wide variety of people who would see the question…
The R11 release seems to have solved this for my QB2009 installation.
@ Pat | May 24, 2010 above’s posting was the fix for our system as well. It would appear that OneNote used the Nul printer port needed by the Quickbooks PDF printer (system running Win 7 Enterprise 64 Bit/Office 2010 Professional- 32 Bit). Thanks, Pat!
Interesting, Dave – I notice that on my test system the OneNote driver isn’t installed (I don’t “print” to it so I never use it). Perhaps that is why I wasn’t running into trouble there.
Big news – if you consider upgrading to QuickBooks 2011, ALL THIS GOES AWAY – as they finally have moved away from the Amyuni printer driver. See http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2010/09/quickbooks-2011-and-pdf-printing-finally-fixed/
I have Windows 7 64 bit and quickbooks 2010 I can’t email from quickbooks what can i do?
Barb, you are probably better off asking that in the Intuit Community Forum so that you can get multiple people helping. Comments in a blog like this are a bit complicated to work out individual problems.
You don’t give us anything to work on – what “revision” are you on, what method of emailing have you selected in your preferences, possibly what version of Office (if you are emailing with Outlook), and what happens when you try to email (just saying “can’t” doesn’t tell me much).
It is so interesting to see all these updates that are available in QB 2011. I just think it is a shame us 2010 users had to be the test monkey for all the good in 2011. I am with another reader who says Intuit should consider these fixes and upgrades to our 2010 versions. It is raping us to expect us to pay for new versions every year……..what do the rest of you think?
Lisa
Lisa, I don’t know if they can easily port this change back into older versions. I don’t have access to that level of technical detail. Some kinds of changes can be easily moved to older versions, some kinds cannot. Since the PDF driver is used in many places, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is technically difficult to do.
That doesn’t say that they CAN’T do it if they wanted to, but that it may take a lot of time for them to do it IF they decide to.
I don’t see the old way as being an experiment (that is how I take your “test monkey” comment?). I see this as an admission that the licensed product that they were using in the past (Amyuni) just wasn’t the right approach, and finally they are moving on to something different rather than trying to keep on working on the old method, which was not successful.
No comment on pricing of upgrades or their upgrade/support policy…
I am having no luck printing using Quickbooks Pro 2006 once I installed it on my new machine that uses Windows 7. What do I do???
Nicole, QB 2006 is not compatible with Windows 7. You may have a hard time with this. You may be able to get it to work if you use Windows XP Mode – see this article for more details: http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2009/10/quickbooks-and-windows-7/
I just upgraded from XP to a windows 7 machine and installed our copy of quickbooks Pro 2009. I cannot open our existing file, it says the my QB pro is only R7 and the file is R10 so I ran update many times and still no luck. I talked to QB and they told me I just have to buy 2010 or 2011 but that seems to always be their reply about any problem “give us more money”. Is there a known fix????
John, they have to tell you that, because Intuit doesn’t officially support the 2009 product on Windows 7. So they can’t tell you about any fixes other than to update to a supported version on that operating system.
The first thing I’d try would be to go to the Intuit support web site and locate the update, download the “manual” update file, run that. Rather than trying to use “automatic” or manual updates from within QuickBooks.
I have quickbooks simple start 2010, it looks as if intuit has removed the DLL from thier website. I was wondering if there was another source for it?
The DLL is no longer needed because the fix it included is a part of a later release (see http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/category/program-updates/qb-2010/ ). I don’t work with Simple Start at all (and it is a discontinued product, now) so I am not sure if they have updates for that or not.
Hi, Charlie.
I have QB2010 R7, was running fine on WindowsXP. Now I have a new computer with Windows 7. Works fine except I can’t save report to a PDF files, QB locks up.
Spent more than 7 hours on the phonw with Intuit Help desk, they say problem is with “my computer”. This is the note they posted to my desktop:
Unable to create a new local port.
Steps to reproduce :
1) Create new local port with name ( example, NUL:)
2) Aftrer creating port close printer setup.
3) Reopen Printer set up and view the ports list – the new port is no longer available.
In attempt to fix added registry key :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT created the DWORD-32 bit key
Named the key EnabledProtocols and the key data equal 6.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Diane
Diane, there isn’t a lot that I can do for you without having access to your system. And even then I can’t say if I would have a resolution. Sometimes things get out of whack in the registry – I would never leave a note for a user to start mucking around in the registry. Too easy to make problems worse.
I can’t give specific advice in your case. Possibly a registry cleaning tool (I don’t have a recommendation, there are several out there but watch out for bogus products), possibly the steps I outline in “method 1″ in my older article at http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2008/10/solving-quickbooks-problems-on-64-bit-vista/. Another option that would PROBABLY fix this is an upgrade to QB 2011, but I hate to recommend that as there is a cost involved. QB 2011 uses a different driver, it should get around this problem (but again, no guarantees).
Charlie,
This problem keeps coming back. It’s been more than a year, and we have all new hardware and new versions of QB, but the problem came back.
Win 7 64bit, Installed QB Prem 2009 (R12) and 2010 (R10).
As soon as we updated 2010 to R10, we stopped being able to send invoices. I assume reconcilation also doesn’t work, but haven’t tried it. Also tried launching 2009, and then updated it to R12. No difference.
I went through the processes in your article above, but still have no success. There is a new driver (Amyuni Document Converter 400) so I tried that one too. Still getting the same error message when trying to email invoices.
The printer icon wants to call itself “QuickBooks PDF Converer 2.0″ so that’s a clue that it’s still somehow the old version. I tried the “Install.exe” in the QuickBooks folder, but it fails with “Error Code: 2″ just after “Copying xmllite.dll file”.
Doug, I don’t know if you are going to have an issue due to running QB 2009 on Windows 7 – if that is going to interfere. Since QB 2009 isn’t officially supported on Windows 7. I don’t have that kind of setup.
In my Win 7 x64 system I have QB 2010 R10 and QB 2011 R3 installed, and I don’t have any problem with saving to PDF with QB 2010. Different situation than yours, but it makes me believe that there could be some other issue in your particular system. Hard to say.
If you right click on the “QuickBooks PDF Converter 2.0″ icon you may find that there is a list of multiple drivers there, and that the later converter is just hidden. You may have both there but it might not be obvious. They can both exist in one system.
Ain’t it fun? I’m trying to find time to write a more comprehensive and up to date check list for PDF issues, but haven’t gotten to it yet. I was kind of waiting on some other blog issues that are kind of up in the air at this time…
I’ve been struggling with the pdf and reconciliation issues with QB2010 and Windows 7 64-bit for quite some time. None of the Intuit solutions worked. I thank you for your assistance on this…your solution was quick, easy to follow, and immediately fixed the problem.
The problem of QB making printers disappear has NOT been resolved in QB Pro 2011. I’m running it on a Windows 7 (64) machine which had been printing reports, checks, etc. just fine up until today. It just will NOT print W-2′s. Or, to be more accurate, it prints the first one, then stops after which all the installed printers have disappeared.
I have had the disappearing printer problem in, at least, the past 2 releases and under both Vista and XP. Intuit seems incapable of solving the problem by adhereing to MS standards for printing. Instead they seem to think they are smarter than everyone else and can invent their own standards. It applies to way more than printing and it continues to get users in trouble. I think this is my last try with Intuit. I’ll start looking for another accounting system.