Migrating Common Files and Data

I continued the move process for my wife's computer last night.  I ran into a couple of things that set off alarm bells while using Easy Transfer to move common computer files and settings.  (Note: I did not say that anything was broken or did not work correctly.  I just noticed some things that I decided not to allow to transfer.)

If you are going to transfer common files and data using Easy Transfer, I suggest you switch to advanced mode.

I switched to advanced mode to see exactly what common items were going to be moved.  There were a lot more files and application settings selected for movement than I was comfortable with allowing to happen.  In particular, moving files located in the C:\Program Files\Common Files directory didn't seem to be a good idea, so unselected the directory.  In the end, I only allowed documents in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users directory to be copied to the new machine.

Migrating QuickBooks 2008 to Windows 7

I ran into some issues when reinstalling QuickBooks 2008 on Windows 7.  It seems that for some reason, my WinSxS may be somewhat corrupted on my Windows 7 machine, based on the registration error I received.  I suspect it may be caused by having VS 2008, VS 2010 and several different Windows SDK Versions installed.  Unfortunately, I am not very careful about the order that I install development software, so I may have stepped all over some toes in the WinSxS subdirectory.

What I have found, so far, is that two components of QuickBooks 2008 will not register properly: QBPrefs.dll and HelpInterfaces.dll.  I simply ignored the failure to register and so far, nothing has gone awry.  Intuit has a couple of things to try, which I will take a look at tonight.  I really suspect that I have not correctly installed the VCRedist for VS 2008 SP 1, so I will reinstall the 32 bit runtimes before I try any complex fixes.

Updated: Based on some quick searches, it looks like QuickBooks 2008 may have some compatibility issues when executing under Windows 7.  I'll keep this topic updated.

I've solved the registration problem

After attempting to register QBPrefs.dll, I noticed that it was looking for VS80.ATL.  Voila!  That's the VS 2005 redistributable C++ runtime, not the VS 2008 runtime.  I downloaded vsredist_86.exe, installed it and the registration problems went away!