Quickbooks “An error has occurred in the script on this page”
I ran into an install of Quickboos Pro 2005 that was having a peculiar problem. When any company file was opened I was seeing an Internet Explorer Script Error message (quickbooks uses Internet Explorer to parse the company page ( Usually C:\Program Files\Intuit\Quickbooks\Components\Pages\Comppage.qpg ) The error basically said “An error has occurred in the script on this page” it gave a line and char number and there were three different Error: messages. One was Object Required and another was Class not registered. This is a Windows XP Pro system with all current updates for windows AND quickbooks.
So, I got to work on internet explorer first. I went to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced (on Explorer 6 sp1) and Checked to “disable script debugging” and unchecked next to the description “Display a notification about every script error. This had NO effect, the messages kept coming.
I saw a post in the newsgroups suggesting a few other ways to deal with script errors…
The first suggestion was to refresh (reinstall) your windows scripting enging (Windows Script 5.6 for Windows 2000 and XP) So, I Downloaded and reinstalled the windows scripting engine. No joy. I also followed the advice to delete the temporary files (tools, internet options, delete files). Again, no luck.
Next, there were instructions to re-register a few dll’s…
start-run-regsvr32 vbscript.dll
(then the same for jscript.dll and a list mentioned in this knowledge base article. Nothing. There was another knowledge base article entitled Scripting Errors When You View Web Pages in Internet Explorer after Installing Office 2003 which didn’t seem relevant (Office XP).
Next it was suggested to disable all 3rd party browsing extensions – good idea… (tools, internet options, advanced, browsing section…. uncheck enable third-party browser extensions…)
The next suggestion I saw was that if none of the above worked it’s probably a browser hijacker of some sort, check for malware… Well, none of the above got me there and frankly this is a CLEAN system. So, I kept looking.
One suggestion I found was to try using Sun’s jave engine instead of microsoft. (So, I went to Java.com and did the free download) That didn’t work either.
I ran into one persons experience where he had discovered that he had used a “special character” in a company file (a 1/2 character in an address) that special character was causing the problem for him, unfortunately this affected multiple business files, not just one so I figured it was long odds. So, the next thing I tried was a bit unorthodox I guess. I first compared the list of recent updates for the non-working and a working XP machine (to see if an update may have made the mess.) Then I took the components directory on the non-working machine and backed it up to the desktop and copied the files from the working machine over. THAT didn’t work, so…
I started down the uninstall/reinstall route. Instead of a complete reinstall though, I was able to choose a “repair” option to attempt to repair the quickbooks install. It worked for about 5-10 minutes and when it finished – all was good and worked again.
So, the moral of the story is probably this… try the “repair” option first. They really didn’t want to go through a complete reinstall if it wasn’t necessary because they always have to re-set some of their default settings (for printing particularly) and pull in the updates. It looked like after the repair some of the updates had to be redownloaded (I’m not sure if ALL were though.) There had been other problems with Quickbooks than this scripting error, but it was the first I got to see (the others had been random logging out of the network share.) I am pretty confident that the repair solved all of the problems. Although in retrospect I’m not sure how I should have assumed that an Internet Explorer script problem would be solved that way… usually it’s the other way around (try to repair IE). (In fact that was one of the other suggestions I found that I couldn’t try on XP pro…)