Quicken 2005 is getting hammered in the Amazon reviews. I can't remember the last product I've seen that was so soundly thrashed. Quicken has restricted the types of financial files that can be imported into the application and in some versions the upgrade appears to be buggy, even causing Intuit's TurboTax to crash. We've been a happy Quicken household for years, but I'm delaying my purchase plans this year.

I have been a Quicken user since Quicken 3 for DOS, i.e. since about 1992. I was even a beta tester for Intuit, a great fan of their products. Well, my opinion has changed. Citing some sort of security and consistency concerns, Intuit has decided to remove support for QIF files. If you know what these are, don't even think about buying QN05. If you don't know what QIF files are and if you don't have an earlier copy of QN, you can probably go ahead and buy Quicken 2005.

QIF files are external files that can be imported into QN. Banks and brokers send them to summarize transactions. In my case, I have about 20 401k investment transactions monthly that I used to import using QN01. Now I have to tediously type in all the data: security, price, shares, ad nauseum.

Update: My father says he's using Quicken Premium 2005 without any of the problems noted in the Amazon reviews.