TurboTax Mac will not start after latest form updates Dec 20 2024

[vinceskahan]

I got email saying schedule B was available so I fired up TurboTax desktop on my m1 mac mini.  It downloaded and installed the required updates.  Now every time it starts I get 'no tax form updates at this time' (it runs the updater every startup), and when I click OK then TurboTax simply exits after about 3 seconds.  No way to actually USE it at all.  It just seemingly aborts.

I'm on the latest MacOS Sequoia 15.2 - is there a way to find some logfile to see what is going on ?  At this time I'm out almost $100 for Premier that won't even run.  Beyond frustrating !!!!

[vinceskahan]

Still fails, now worse than before with bouncing beachball of death, no way to report the 'snag', then aborts totally.  This is just AWFUL software.  C'mon people don't you test at all any more ?  Completely unusable.

I posted to the ttax forum on Reddit and somebody else reported the same issue, so it's pervasive.

[vinceskahan · Accepted solution]

UPDATE - FIXED - it turns out that now if you have your ttax data directory on a drive synched to Dropbox that you need to have Dropbox running before starting ttax.  This is new behavior, as previously for 10+ years things worked just fine with the data locally and synched to Dropbox whenever Dropbox was intermittently started up as needed.

This broke Family Tree Maker similarly.  In that case I got messages saying the data file wasn't compatible, and of course it was.  Trying again with Dropbox running and it was fine.

Uncertain if it's Apple or Dropbox at fault here, but it seems this is 'not' a TurboTax bug.  Just passing along the scoop in case others run into it.

(FWIW - I would hope TurboTax would just pop a 'cannot find file at path /something/here' dialog to tell the user what the issue is.)