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How to Stop QuickBooks Desktop Advertisements & Crashes

Stop QuickBooks Desktop Advertisements & Crashes

Make these changes to your “hosts” file to block QuickBooks from requesting marketing messages from Intuit’s servers.

Note: These changes also seem to stop various QuickBooks crashes! Theoretically this is because when QuickBooks isn’t able to contact Intuit’s marketing servers, it does not instantiate its recently-new-and-buggy 3rd-party freeware embedded browser, which appears to cause various exceptions in the windows kernel, which in turn causes QuickBooks and other applications to crash or hang.

Steps

1) open your “hosts” file

Steps:
– Press the Windows key.
– Type Notepad in the search field.
– In the search results, right-click Notepad and select Run as administrator.
– Open the file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

2) Add the following lines to the file:

127.0.0.1 logit.api.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 spcentitlement.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 alerts.accnts.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 sci.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 qbdtipd.qbinproduct.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 edge.experimentation.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 tcontent.quickbooks.com
127.0.0.1 http-download.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 trinity.platform.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 appcenter.intuit.com
127.0.0.1 qb31bgocd.quickbooks.com           #QuickBooks 2021
127.0.0.1 qb31bgpatch.quickbooks.com        #QuickBooks 2021
127.0.0.1 qb32bgocd.quickbooks.com           #QuickBooks 2022 (presumed)
127.0.0.1 qb32bgpatch.quickbooks.com        #QuickBooks 2022 (presumed)
127.0.0.1 qb33bgocd.quickbooks.com           #QuickBooks 2023 (presumed)
127.0.0.1 qb33bgpatch.quickbooks.com        #QuickBooks 2023 (presumed)
127.0.0.1 qb34bgocd.quickbooks.com           #QuickBooks 2024 (presumed)
127.0.0.1 qb34bgpatch.quickbooks.com        #QuickBooks 2024 (presumed)

#Commented out addresses, which you might want to include:

#127.0.0.1 http-download.intuit.com      #disables downloads including payroll updates
#127.0.0.1 webconnectorclientapp.config-cdn.a.intuit.com
#127.0.0.1 accounts.intuit.com
#127.0.0.1 rebill-sbg.api.intuit.com
#127.0.0.1 assets.intuitcdn.net
#127.0.0.1 oauth.platform.intuit.com

3) Save the file

Our experience

After making these changes, we have noted that:

  • QuickBooks no longer randomly pops up adds using windows that appear to be stylized browser windows, or on the home page, or on the left icon-bar. All adds seems to have stopped.
  • Our browsers and Windows File Explorer now rarely crash when opening QuickBooks company files, which used to happen consistently.
  •  QuickBooks seems to have stopped prompting us to log into our Intuit account, which was a constant nuance especially when working with client files.

Troubleshooting

We have not seen any negative side-effect in QuickBooks, such as a feature that don’t work. However, we don’t use all features.

If you notice any issues with any QuickBooks features after making these changes, probably limited to connected features, edit the hosts file again and add hash-tags (the # character) to comment out one or more lines and then test to see if the feature works (probably, restart QuickBooks first). Once you find the line that enables the feature again, remove the hash-tag from the other lines and re-test.

Credit

This information was first posted by MasterBlaster as an response to this post on the QuickBooks community.