A big thank you to IntuitEric and the technical team at Intuit. The communication is greatly appreciated!

I don’t know yet if the MSI/Rollback adjustment will allow me to print/save/efile my 2021 and earlier ProSeries returns, but my hunch is that it will give me what I need right now. Given the somewhat technical nature of this work-around, I will call in my IT people to help me apply the patch. This should be called what it appears to be: a patch as good can be expected for right now – not a full-blown permanent solution.

Some context may be helpful. Windows Updates often break things. A recent article in TechRadar (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/windows-11-update-breaks-start-menu-for-some-customizati...) explains the situation of a couple of third party customization applications that stopped working after a March 2023 Windows Update from Microsoft.

“[The] issues have appeared again, it seems Microsoft has got fed up, and is washing its hands of the matter. As advised in a release health status update for Windows 11, Microsoft says: “We recommend uninstalling any third-party UI customization app before installing KB5028254 to prevent this issue. If your Windows device is already experiencing this issue, you might need to contact customer support for the developer of the app you are using.”

The issue is marked as ‘mitigated external’ which basically means it’s up to the developer (an external party) to fix it for their app (as happened in the past), and Microsoft doesn’t want to know.

In short, affected users only have two options: nag the developer for a fix, or uninstall the customization app in question.

Is that a reasonable response from Microsoft? In fairness to the software giant, it has previously noted that some of these apps use “unsupported methods to achieve their customization” and that this can produce weird side-effects. Given that the methods are ‘unsupported,’ Microsoft’s view is that it doesn’t have to take this software into consideration when updating Windows 11 code (especially if this is going to happen repeatedly, which seems to be the case).

We don’t feel that’s unreasonable of Microsoft in all honesty, but still, the response does feel a little cold and ‘not our problem’ in nature.”

One difference here may be that unlike small developers of interface customization software, Intuit is a sizeable force in the marketplace, and has the resources to encourage Microsoft to provide more assistance.

I often find the comments sections in articles like the one from TechRadar to be helpful. There a handful of developers/Redit-style programmers who give their perspective on the finger-pointing back-and-forth that often occurs with software incompatibility problems:

“this [Microsoft] patch doesn’t seem to have been the problem, it was 3rd party programs [ProSeries] using hacky workarounds…. which people wouldn't need to use if Microsoft would just quit breaking the UI and leave well enough alone.”

“Or if they'd [Microsoft] provide hooks for this kind of customization. If you [Microsoft] don't want people [Intuit] to do it the "wrong" way, you have to provide a "right" way.”

While a more permanent solution is hoped for, thanks again to the team at Intuit ProSeries for doing your job under less than ideal circumstances. There is more work to do – always.