This year, as I have done routinely for the last few years, I am using TurboTax to do my income tax returns. TurboTax is an Intuit product, the same company that brings us Quicken and QuickBooks. In my opinion, Intuit's products represent some of the best software I have ever had the pleasure of using. Unfortunately, that pleasure does not extend to this year's TurboTax product. I am not competent to comment on the accuracy of the tax-related issues, other than to say that I do not see any glaring problems. As a piece of software however, this year's TurboTax, is by far, the worst Intuit product I have ever used.

Let us start with the installation process. When I first installed TurboTax it did not install properly. Not only that, but it affected the stability of my machine so badly, that I thought I was going to have to reformat my hard disk and rebuild my system from scratch. Fortunately, it turned out that the problems I was having were known issues, and I was able to find instructions on the TurboTax website to completely remove the software from my computer. Then, with the help of Norton Utilities, I was able to get my system back into a stable condition.

After fixing my computer, I was able to install TurboTax by booting my computer in SAFE MODE (this is a standard windows option). Once my tax software was installed, I went ahead and used it to prepare a tax return. The tax return preparation was trouble free. When I went to print the return I ran into problems. I tried to print directly to my printer, and I also tried creating a PDF file. Neither would work. I finally discovered that if I rebooted my machine, and then went into TurboTax, I could print and/or create PDF files. However, I needed to do the reboot every time I needed to print.

Shame on you Intuit, I expect this kind of problem from Microsoft, but not Intuit software. I will give TurboTax a try again next year, but if they do not do a darn sight better than they did this year, I will be looking for a new tax software provider in 2006.