A known bug in Quick Books in 64 Bit systems

Having just spent the better part of two days trying to get the built in pdf printer required for “send to email” in  Quick Books Accounting 09-10 to work I decided that I had better document what I did. I don’t know what it was that actually fixed the problem but I did loads of research and tried everything that was suggested in blogs and help files and nothing really worked but in the end I got it to work so I decided to document some of the things that apppear to make a difference.

We have Quickbooks running on Windows Home Server 2011, 64Bit, accessing it through Terminal Services. This is running on a server at home which keeps it separated from the main site and backed up. The problem started when we upgraded to the latest version of Home Server running on  a 64 bit platform. It actually worked ok on that system until we attached a new printer that also had 64 bit architecture, then the problems started.

Among the error messages received (they changed and they are not limited to what is below):

“QuickBooks could not save your form as a PDF File.” & “Your forms were not sent because QuickBooks could not create the necessary PDF files.”
  “Could not print to printer.  Check your printer selection”  Printer may have been cancled from another program.

The things I did – don’t know what actually worked but if the problem re-occurs I will revisit in this order:

Close and reopen Quickbooks after each change to see whether the fix worked.

  • Go to Devices and Printers and check that the default printer is NOT a redirected one. If it is, right click on one that doesn’t say “redirected” select “set as default”. The green tick should appear on the selected printer.
  • Right click on the desktop shortcut and select run in XP service pack 3 emulation mode. Nothing I tried worked until I did this so I would do it first next time and retry sending to email
  • Go to Devices and Printers on the start menu, select printer properties for the Quickbooks pdf converter (note separately exactly what it is called – some end in 2 or 3, and note the driver being used – Amyuni 2.5 or 3), go to Advanced Tab and click spool print documents . . . , untick Enable advanced printing features, then retick print directly to printer
  • Check the ports – click on any printer and “Print Server Properties ” should appear as a selection under the menu. Select it and choose the Ports tab. Quickbooks pdf convertere should appear against the Nul: port. This is often the one that One Note is directed to. I changed One Note to File: and then changed Quickbooks to Nul: (this is necessary becauyse it is where it is looking for the driver)
  • Remove existing Quickbooks document converters: open the Printers and Devices folders, right-click QuickBooks PDF Converter and Amyuni Document Converter icons and choose Remove Device or just click delete.
  • Go to Printer Server (click on any printer to show the printer server in the menu bar) – delete all quickbooks and Amyuni drivers shown in the drivers tab. When you start Quickbooks these are rebuilt. After doing this recheck all of the earlier settings are right.
  • Right click on the Quickbooks shortcut and go to Open File Location  – find the install application or Install.exe, double click on it and this will reinstall the printer drivers
  • Go to Printers and Devices right-click the Amyuni Document Converter and choose Printer Propertiesand rename the file to
    • QuickBooks PDF Converter: QuickBooks 2007, 2008, 2009 R1-R8, 2009 R11
    • QuickBooks PDF Converter 2.0: QuickBooks 2010 R1-R2, QuickBooks 2010 R6 and above
    • QuickBooks PDF Converter 3.0: QuickBooks 2009 R9-R10, QuickBooks 2010 R3-R5