If you use a PC instead of a Mac you are no doubt accustomed to those Microsoft Updates that they want you to download and allow to be installed. I'm pretty sure it's not a good idea to ignore them, but every so often I think they send a lemon. Or at least I hope that is what is wrong with our PC and not a real virus.

A few days ago all of a sudden we couldn't get into our MSN mail unless the security level on the computer was set to allow all cookies. I don't like that setting because I don't want a bunch of sneaky advertising crap showing up, not to mention maybe a virus or two.

But then last night my Quickbooks application would not even launch. My life passed before my eyes because it's tax prep season and all the info is in there. I had backups of some of the files that could be imported into a clean version of the software, but then I'd have to go back and re-enter several bank statements because not all my files had been backed up in the last couple of weeks. Not a happy thought.

Besides, before Windows 7 came out, Quickbooks' latest version only ran on Vista (not older systems like XP) and I didn't want to forced into buying new computers running Vista to install it. I am waiting for the kinks of Windows 7 to be ironed out (don't know what they are, but Microsoft system software always has kinks) before considering my next upgrades.

Trying to think of what had gone wrong, one of the possibilities was the software had a time bomb in it - maybe it would stop functioning after January 15 2010. But that would be counter-productive for the Intuit company to use such tactics to force customers to upgrade to newer products. More appropriate, and I would not put this past a software company, would be to have warnings within the software so the customers would have time to upgrade to the new versions and get their data imported into it.

Anyhow, before I acted on that possibility I decided to set my system back to before the cookies thing came up in case there was some malicious thing that had gotten onto our computer (for instance the most recent Microsoft update) and sure enough my Quickbooks program started working again. Darn those Microsoft people! Just darn them!

So things are okay for now, and I am hoping that the brain trust at Microsoft will figure out there was a problem with their last update and do something about it. Meanwhile, it's as if I never downloaded that last one, I hope, although we seem to still have the cookies issue going on.