QuickBooks Premier 2005 generates an 0x00401743 error when opening a QuickBooks company file when installed on a terminal server.

For ease of use and performance reasons, my customers like to install QuickBooks on the server that is hosting Microsoft terminal server service that is built in to Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers.

Most of my customers want the QuickBooks users to run QuickBooks and nothing else. One of my customers secured his server (unbeknownst to me) by removing the group Everyone from the permission tab of the first hard drive C: That kept the QuickBooks user out of the folders that they did not need to browse. The QuickBooks share was read/write to all the users in the QuickBooks security group. The appropriate folders security settings were tweaked per the articles found on the QuickBooks help forums, documents, and websites. Yet a non-administrative user still would get a fatal error message as indicated below when ever they attempted to open a company file.

Visual C++ runtime error QuickBooks Premier: Professional Services Edition 2005(multi-user)(xxx): qbw32.exe - Application Error : The instruction at "0x00401743" referenced memory at "0x031a2004". The memory could not be "read".

I loaded up FileMon and RegMon from Sysinternals (a most wonderful site - please support them) and captured what was happening when I opened a company file. There I saw that QuickBooks was attempting to open the root file system (C:\) and was being denied. Why QuickBooks 2005 wants to open the the root of C: drive I cannot say but the problem and the solution became apparent. I reviewed the security settings on the C: drive and discovered that the customer at one point in time, secured the C: drive from all users by deleting the Everyone group that normally exists as to allow read only access. I added the QuickBooks user group (you are putting all your QuickBooks users in a security group right?) with read only permissions to the C: drive security settings. Once the security settings on the C: drive were corrected, the regular (non-administrative) terminal server users began to work perfectly!

That all it took to resolve the 0x00401743 error message.

It appears that Intuit has more work to do to make sure that the QuickBooks software only opens what it needs to. As we move into more secure computing environments, issues like these will continue to crop up. Tools like those provided by Sysinternals along with a bit of experience will permit troubleshooting and resolving problems such as this in the field. A better place to address permission issues like these would be with the software provider during their Quality Control assessment cycles and not the application installer nor the less technologically endowed end user.