2016 Lacerte Tax Program hangs at the welcome screen with an error message

[AlabamaTaxman]

When I sign in to LaCerte 2016, I can't remove the welcome screen.  It's the one promoting add-ons like Link and e-signatures.

When I click on Continue, I get an error message about failure to load the file PTG.Lacerte.Telemetry, version=3.0.0.48. (I have version 3.0.0.51.) I get the same message when I click the red close button.  When I click Continue on the error message, it disappears, but the welcome screen remains.  Doing it again gets the same result.  It's a loop I can't get out of.

I have reinstalled the program directly from the web site after uninstalling my existing version, but the result is the same.

[User FIDO 61]

Have you tried the Tool Hub? ↓↓↓

Fix common problems and errors with the Lacerte Tool Hub

[AlabamaTaxman]

Thank you.  The moose, huh?  Must have missed it.  I didn't know there was a Lacerte Tool Hub.  

Anyway, I tried it, and, unfortunately it did not work.  I still get the same error message and can't get out of the loop between the error message and the welcome screen.

Does the moose have any other ideas?

[User FIDO 61]

National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) Park's closed.

[User FIDO 61]

This potential fix is not exactly the same issue you are having however, I'm not coming up with any other ideas at the moment. 

Lacerte program or a Lacerte pop-up window opens off screen

→→ Option 2 - Troubleshooting manually

Close the program

Press the Windows + R keys to open the Run command

Type %appdata% in the Search (Run) field

Press Enter, then open the Lacerte folder on the new window that pops up.

Rename the configuration (ini) file for that year (e.g., W16tax.ini for 2016 Lacerte).

Re-open the program

[AlabamaTaxman]

User ID 61 - Thank you for all of your efforts.  

I finally fixed it.  I always thought that uninstalling a program would delete all of the files in that program.  Not so in this case.  I checked after uninstalling and I couldn't tell if anything was deleted; all the files still seemed to be there.  Does Windows just hide the program from the user without deleting anything?  

I had to go in to the program directory and delete everything by hand, except for the data files.  Then I downloaded a fresh copy of the program and the prep file and it is now working.  

I suspect some files got corrupted last year when I had to replace my computer.

[User FIDO 61]

I cannot speak to what Windows does during Uninstall. However I am aware each Application has it's own specific Uninstall. Windows is complex enough on its own. Third party product like Intuit's Lacerte potentially causes still more dominoes to fall. At times a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

When replacing PC what method did you use? Transfer data from old machine to new via cable or cloud, or backup old machine and restore that backup onto new machine? Likely as you suspect, something went sideways during that process.

[AlabamaTaxman]

My computer refused to boot up one morning, and I had to get technicians to copy the hard drive to an external drive and then transfer the program and data files from the external drive to a new computer. 

Most of that went smoothly, but some programs add files to the Windows system directories when installed and there was no way to determine what those were.  So, I likely missed some required files which meant I had to reinstall from the original source.  Fortunately, I keep all program installation files so I can reinstall whenever I need to.

One effect of the file transfers is that the modification date of over half of the files was reset to the date of the transfer to the new computer.  That's one of the things that motivated me to check what was left after uninstalling Lacerte.  I figured that having the wrong modification date might have corrupted some files.  If the reinstallation was not replacing those files, the program might fail to work correctly.

It seems like that idea was functionally correct.  After deleting all of the files except for the data directories, the new installation worked as it should.