Getting Quickbooks Pro 2019 to work on Windows 10 21H2

Turns out there’s two hurdles to launching Quickbooks as they used some old Windows dependencies

  1. Internet Explorer needed for DLL/ActiveX/DCOM
  2. XPS Writer needed for PDF libraries

In later versions of Windows 10, IE11 was turned off by default, and 21H2 made it difficult to re-enable it by hiding it from Windows’s (optional) features checkboxes, so it needs to be enabled through command line.

If you do not enable Microsoft’s XPS Writer feature, you’ll get this error message about PDF on start, though XPS is Microsoft challenger to PDF so they are not the same thing

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Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 21H2

Microsoft has disabled Internet Explorer on later versions of Windows 10 as they really want people to use Microsoft Edge. However, disabling Internet Explorer 11 might break some software such as Quickbooks 2019, which relied on old fashioned DLLs.

Since 21H2, Microsoft went the extra mile preventing users from re-enabling Internet Explorer 11 by hiding it from GUI ways to turn Windows features on or off (whether you use the app mode interface or the classic optionalfeature.exe interface launchable from control panel’s “Programs and Features”). Instead this needs to be enabled from the command line

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/developer/browsers/installation/disable-internet-explorer-windows

dism /online /Add-Capability /CapabilityName:Browser.InternetExplorer~~~~0.0.11.0.

or

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:Internet-Explorer-Optional-amd64.

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