Thanks, Larry for the exhaustive troubleshooting. Your recommendations
worked fine for me.

It is amazing that Microsoft would ship with such an easily reproduceable
bug - and in multiple revisions, no less. Here's hoping that Microsoft PSS
or product team folks are seeing this (and fixing it).

Whoops, need to make another correction to my earlier post.

It's too long of a story to go into why I did this, but the bottom line is I
turned on the "Compress my backup files" option, and soon after that, I began
again occasionally noticing the failure-to-quit problem. I know in one of my
previous posts I had said the problem appeared to be unaffected by the
setting of the Compress option, but I now have empiric evidence that
statement was wrong.

Since I turned off the Compress option, I haven't seen another occurrence of
the failure-to-quit problem.

-- LBA

"afrinl" wrote:

- quote -

Paulie --

I was playing around some more with the MSMoney 2006 backup settings
tonight, and I discovered something that may have caused the "Ask Me"
automatic backup setting to fail for you (with regard to clearing the app out
of memory after the backup is finished).

If you go back into Tools, Settings, Backup Settings, you'll see two general
classes of settings, "Automatically backup my Money file every time I close
Money" and "Perform scheduled backups every...days".

In order to get Money to clear out of memory at program close time, you have
to:

(1) Check "Automatically backup my Money file every time I close Money"
(2) Check "Ask me before backing up"
(3) Uncheck "Perform scheduled backups every...days"

The "Compress backup files" setting doesn't seem to affect this problem one
way or the other, nor does the setting of how many backup files Money should
retain.

Therefore, you may have checked the "Ask me" setting, but if your "Perform
scheduled backups every...days" setting was also checked, the program will
not clear out of memory after finishing the backup (even though the main app
window clears off the screen) and you'll get the "MS Money is already
running" error on your next attempt to start up the app.

Make sure "Perform scheduled backups every...days" is unchecked.

Good luck!

-- LBA

"afrinl" wrote:

- quote -

Oh, well, sorry. Worked for me, so it'll probably work for at least some
folks. Sorry "some folks" didn't include you -- I feel your pain.

Caveat emptor, I guess.

-- LBA

"Paulie" wrote:

- quote -

Nope.
Doesn't work here.
Left Automatic Backup engaged and checked "Ask me".
Still got "Money Already Running" when I tried to go back in.
--
Paulie...boogie boarding in retirement!


"afrinl" wrote:

- quote -

Hello --

I upgraded from MS Money '03 to '06 last night (had to, 'cause my bank said
they wouldn't support '03 any longer even though it was working fine for my
basic needs, fortunately only had to shell out a net $9.99 (for an unneeded
copy of TaxCut Standard) plus tax and the 37 cent stamp for mailing in the
Money Standard/TaxCut $29.95 joint purchase rebate form), and though the
upgrade process itself ran smoothly (despite giving the visual appearance of
an awfully amateurish installation program -- I always thought MS had some
pretty bright programmers working for them, so I'm guessing they outsourced
the development of the Money installation program), when I started running
'06 I ran smack dab into two problems, one of which I was having in '03 (a
sign-in problem I'll discuss in a separate posting) and a second, new one
which apparently has plagued Money '05 users and now '06 users, too -- the
"Money is already running" or "Money won't quit" problem.

Fortunately, after spending an hour playing around with the "won't quit"
problem this morning, I found a reasonably unburdensome workaround.

The problem, as y'all already know, is that when Money is in its default
config and you exit it, it goes through the default automatic backup, it goes
through the default sync with Moneycentral, and then the Money window
disappears off the screen -- but not out of memory. It still shows as an
active task in the process list in Task Manager (though never consuming any
CPU time, so clearly it's just plain hung, waiting for something). And that
means that if you try to fire up the app again, the second copy gives you a
little errorbox that says "MS Money is already running" and then exits,
leaving you little choice but to whack (End Process) the stuck msmoney.exe
out of the process list in Task Manager.

Some folks have reported that if you wait long enough (minutes to hours,
possibly (according to some) depending on the size of your .mny file), it
finally goes away; others have reported literally waiting more than a whole
day and it still won't go away and therefore it has to be killed with an End
Process in Task Manager. Some have hypothesized it's still trying to run
some background update process which is trying to contact some server that's
slow to respond, and that's why it takes so long to finally leave memory.
With all due respect, that hypothesis is wrong. When a user exits an app in
a normal fashion, it should exit immediately. If the app wants to run
background processes on exit, it should fire them off as independent threads
which then won't prevent the user from immediately re-launching the app. No,
the hypothesis is wrong. If the app isn't exiting immediately, it's due to a
bug in its termination code.

Well, I figured out (well, confirmed, to be more accurate) where the bug is,
and I also figured out how to get around it pretty easily -- without having
to resort to the trouble of pulling up Task Manager, finding the msmoney.exe
task, and doing an End Process on it.

As many of you have already identified, the problem is in the backup
process, and if you turn off automatic backup (Tools, Settings, Backup
Settings), the app properly disappears off Task Manager's process list after
it finishes the sync with MoneyCentral and closes the user interface window.

Of course, not having an absolutely up-to-date backup of your .mny file
every time you exit the app is, well, I'll say it, stupid. So you've got to
have a backup. Well, what about a manual backup?

Interestingly, a little experimentation shows that if you turn off automatic
backups, the act of invoking a manual backup (File, Backup) does *not*
trigger the won't-quit bug. This is true regardless of when you invoke the
manual backup, including just before exiting the app.

But, relying on some degree of obsessive-compulsiveness to regularly invoke
a manual backup just before exiting is begging for trouble.

So, you need a reliable backup, but automatic backup triggers the won't-quit
bug, and most of us aren't O-C enough to rely on manual backup. Catch-22,
right? Not quite. Fortunately, there's a fix:

On the Tools, Settings, Backup Settings page, leave Automatic Backup engaged
*but also* check the "Ask me before backing up" box. What this of course
will do is automatically pop up a confirmation dialog each time you exit the
app, and if you click the "Back Up Now" button in the dialog, it'll then go
through the same backup routine it would have gone through if you had
Automatic Backup engaged but didn't have the "Ask me" box checked.

For some reason -- damned if I know why -- if the
automatic-backup-at-program-exit process is forced to pop up that
confirmation dialog box, the won't-quit bug isn't triggered. It doesn't even
matter whether you click on the "Back Up Now" or the "Postpone" button in the
dialog box. Either way, the won't-quit bug is not triggered -- and that
means the app exits properly and you can then re-launch it anytime you want,
including immediately.

So, clearly, there's some aspect to the Money code near the beginning of the
automatic-backup process that's setting up an erroneous state which later
(after the backup, and after the MoneyCentral sync) will prevent the app from
taking the final step of clearing itself out of memory, but the act of
calling up the confirmation dialog either corrects or bypasses the erroneous
state setting.

Here's hoping somebody on the MS staff will read this and get an engineer to
look at that code and fix it and issue a patch. Meanwhile, if all I have to
do to get the app to smoothly exit is one additional click (or, even easier,
just hit the Enter key to accept the default "Back Up Now" action), I can
live with that until my bank forces me to upgrade again in another three
years or so.

-- Larry Afrin, M.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology
Director of Information Technology, Hollings Cancer Center
Medical University of South Carolina
afrinl[at]musc.edu

P.S. Of course, there's one other workaround to this problem that is
literally a zero-additional-effort workaround (as opposed to the above
one-click (or one-key) workaround). What you would have to do would be to
set up a batch command file in which the first command is a START /WAIT
command that cranks up the Money app (making sure, of course, that Money is
configured to *not* do Automatic Backups), and the second command is a COPY
/Y command that copies your .mny file to a similarly named backup .mny file
(I don't think you can copy from .mny to .mbf because there may well be some
important format differences between .mny and .mbf files). Then, set up a
desktop (or Start, All Programs) shortcut to this batch file and use that
shortcut to launch Money (instead of directly launching Money). Ta-da!
You'll get a fresh back-up each time *after* Money exits.