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Question

windows 8 update removing programs

Feb 22, 2015 1:05AM PST

I try to help people with computers. One friend does essentially nothing but email reading, a few websites, a little locally installed solitaire. She's on Windows 8, so I set her up with the Shell. She also uses Quicken 2011 which is registered. Every time she allows an upgrade to Windows, the Shell software and Quicken are uninstalled. Indeed, they are moved or noted in a folder called "uninstalled software" on her desktop. Other programs are not affected, but she doesn't have much.

She has Norton, and she has Malwarebytes, both running just fine. This just happens when WINDOWS does an upgrade and it has happened several times.

I have googled this and some people have said they've lost programs in a similar way; the remedy is always to go back to an earlier system restore point, etc. Reinstalling these two programs takes less time than doing a system restore - the data in Quicken is not lost.

Is there some flag that needs to be set to stop WIndows from doing this?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Sadly I'm going with this could happen.
Feb 22, 2015 1:18AM PST

As the OS updates, apps could break like that. I know folk want a zero maintenance OS but this OS is still suffering from the ideas created back in 2000 and prior. That is, we get to backup and be ready to reinstall or fix as needed.

There are no signs Microsoft is going to change this area yet.
Bob

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Answer
I haven't seen this with Windows 8.
Feb 22, 2015 1:30AM PST

I have two PCs at home and 4 I support with Windows 8.1 and Classic Shell. I have Quicken 2013 installed on one of them. None of these have ever had the experience you describe. I can say that any version of Quicken more than 3 years old is no longer supported by Intuit. I'm wondering if the PC you describe has had a so called registry cleaner run on it. This sounds like the kind of thing that results from registry cleaner programs. These programs are snake oil, are completely unnecessary, don't help anything, and can cause this kind of thing to happen.

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(NT) Bumped into it on the 8.0 to 8.1 update.
Feb 22, 2015 1:32AM PST
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PS. Should have elaborated.
Feb 22, 2015 1:33AM PST

It's mostly about antivirus suites but one client was screaming about desktop icons that went missing. I can't guess why that's a big deal but let's face it. Folk want to use the PCs and tablets without having to make or move their shortcuts back to where they were.
Bob

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I believe you Bob, I don't remember that happening w/me.
Feb 22, 2015 1:46AM PST

All 6 of my PCs had Windows 8.0 Professional installed, then upgraded to 8.1 and all the subsequent maintenance. It's been long enough since I did that that I could've forgotten its happening to me with that really major upgrade. Windows has definitely gone through a pot full of evolution, and we know how big it has become when we see the Windows ISO files taking 3 GB. That has to be at least several hundreds of millions of instructions, so anything is possible with such a beast, and why MS comes out with dozens of "updates" every month. Methinks they're really missing the influence of having Mr. Gates there full time, especially when I see what they're doing with the 9926 update of Windows 10. As they say, YMMV.

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I agree about the old Quicken BUT
Feb 22, 2015 4:12AM PST

She has a Quicken 2015 update disk. When we have the problem and Quicken has been removed, we put in the update disk, go to the Quicken site, try to download 2015 and it obligingly downloads 2011. (!!) Which works just fine. I don't think Intuit would keep it on its site if it weren't still supported.. THe question of a registry cleaner hadn't occurred to me - I'll check for that. But it definitely happens when WINDOWS does an update.