Several weeks ago I was called by someone who advised that they needed help installing QuickBooks 2016. After arrival at their place of business the story began. They had been using QuickBooks 2013 without issues, but in preparation for the product's 'sunset' on May 31st, they purchased and downloaded 2016. They attempted to install the program, and all seemed normal until they tried to actually open QuickBooks, the result........."Nothing", absolutely nothing happened. They subsequently uninstalled and re-installed QuickBooks, same result. They then downloaded the program again, uninstalled QuickBooks and re-installed and, you guessed it, the same results, absolutely nothing happened. They gave up, and called technical support. After hours on the phone, and remove sessions with at least 3 different technical support agents, there was nothing new to report; QuickBooks simply would not run. So they called me.
Now you might guess that I would take the exact same steps, or essentially the same with one difference, I actually took a copy of the program on a flash drive with me, because in the past I have seen instances of where the program was corrupted during download. No such luck in this case, after performing a clean-uninstall and install with 'my copy', nothing changed, QuickBooks simply would not launch.
Now this wasn't a 'cheap' computer, this was a Dell Precision Workstation with lots of RAM, 2 high-speed hard-drives on a RAID controller, Xenon Processors, and top of the line everything when it came to the hardware components. Don't forget, this machine had been running QB-2013 without issue.
So now the 'dirty work' begins, the updates and verification of all of the 3rd party components that QuickBooks requires like Microsoft .NET framework, C++ and MSXML, no problems found, but still nothing. Not to stretch the software side of this equation out too far, but when you back-up the entire contents of the computer, wipe the hard-drives, reinstall the operating system and hardware drivers, update everything, and then restore everything and you still get the same results, the software is not the likely cause.
Next comes the 'tear-it-apart' phase, when you essentially replace (on a test basis) almost every hardware components, and return to operational normality and then QuickBooks still won't run it pretty well boils down to one thing...."Lucifer is living in that box", or at least that is how my brother who did all the IT work put it.
In reality there was only one hardware and software related component of the computer that was not changed, the RAID controller. Sherlock Holmes said, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” No matter how improbable it seems that a RAID controller could prevent QuickBooks from running, every other possibility was eliminated; other than, this simply was, 'the computer from Hell.'