TurboTax Deluxe 2022 wouldn't print or generate a PDF no matter how I initiated the action: A pop-up saying something about "processing" (more or less) would flash on and off my screen too quickly to read, followed by an interminable beachball and Activity Monitor's advising me that the app wasn't responding, necessitating my force-quitting it. So I posted in their help forum and was eventually advised to call in.

With the tech sharing my screen (through some proprietary means) I ran him through the routine, force-quit the app, restarted it, and lo and behold, after no less than 50 failures, IT WORKED as expected (and has continued to work).

Could the screen-sharing have possibly tweaked something?

Did I hit the jackpot in some sort of TurboTax lottery?

Serious conjecture and wild guesses gratefully accepted!

For what it is worth, and on the assumption that your computer was restarted multiple times during the troubleshooting process, I can only speculate and due to a lack of data it would be more of a W.A.G. than speculation.

1. Bad Kharma (high on my list of suspects )
2. a startup item that either got turned off or updated somewhere along the line.
3. A task, running in the background that eventually concluded
4. a background task that was automatically updated without your noticing
5. a corrupted scratch file that eventually got overwritten or replaced

Now maybe you can explain to me why H&R Block and one or two other apps refuse to update so i have to download and install the full app every time.

Update...

• When you install TurboTax, Glance is installed along with it.
• While I was dealing with the Intuit tech, and, I think, precisely while my attempt to generate a PDF was beach-balling, one Glance plist was modified, and two minutes later, a new one was generated.
• Immediately afterwards, I was able to generate the elusive PDF.

Technically, there doesn't seem to be any reason why Glance should interact with TurboTax, but it seems like it would have been an awfully bizarre coincidence for what happened to have happened both on its own and at that particular moment.

Aside: I'm finding this year's TT Deluxe to be a major purveyor of beachballs! It's always been on he slow side, but this year, it's outdoing itself.

I've been curious for years about the fact that all TurboTax updates are virtually the same size, and I'll guess that your question as it relates to H&R Block mirrors my curiosity, and here's what I've thunk up...

TT is unusual in that it doesn't offer users the luxury of time: You install it, launch it, update it, and prepare and file your tax return, and if there's a glitch in the update, you either find out about when it's too late, or never find out about it at all.

So I'll guess that TT does its best to minimize the possibility of those possible scenarios by reinstalling the entire guts of the app in every update, rather than doing traditional line-by-line updates.

Perhaps what you've described is H&R Block's approach to the problem.

H&RBlock schedules regular monthly updates throughout the entire tax season and the planned release dates are published with the initial app release. The app tracks each form as Preliminary or Final and all the forms used in your return must be finalized before the app will permit you to file the return. That said, each update is essentially a complete replacement of the previous version and I have never had to backtrack or reenter previous data between updates or noticed any change in the questionnaire. The questions do not change, just the reporting format, and perhaps some underlying calculations. As Texas has no state income tax I have no direct experience, but it appears the earlier updates are due to last minute IRS reporting changes and the later updates are more often the result of last minute tweaks from the various state tax agencies. Any filing delays I have are almost exclusively waiting for third parties to send 1099s or donation receipts. All of which makes the failure of the update function to work properly even more inexplicable.

That sounds pretty much like how TurboTax works other than its updates not being regularly scheduled, and, I ASSume, some other concessions to Intuit's design copyrights.

I've always guessed that bug fixes were major parts of the updates. In my early TT days, I found bugs in even the simple parts/computations, so I can imagine what might have been going wrong in the complicated parts/computations.

As for each update [being] essentially a complete replacement of the previous version (which you originally questioned), I'll stick with my guess that it's to avoid the multitudinous glitch possibilities that a line by line update would present.

Whether partial updates are less subject to error or not depends on the design and implementation of the code. If object-oriented design and coding have been rigorously adhered to, along with an end to end test suite designed to break the code and not just prove that it works, a module by module update should be less likely to induce new errors and permit much faster turn around times.

That's a lot of "ifs" to get to a mere "should be."

And even iin the best of circumstances, why would that yield better results than the "clean installs" we're looking at?

Those Ifs and shoulds are not theoretical, they are proven facts. I used Ifs and shoulds because they are dependent on humans for their implementation. I could explain the theory and facts behind my assertions, as I successfully did to over 3,000 software engineers, but given an audience of experienced graduate software engineers, open-minded management, and equally qualified customers as the audience, it took eighty intense classroom hours and often a subsequent few months of implementation experience for full comprehension.

Be that as it may, I always preferred full updates of macOS and apps on macOS on the theory that it is possible a third party app might have altered something in the OS and the full update would restore all the code to factory new. Third party interference has never been possible in iOS or iPadOS and has become highly unlikely in macOS 12 and 13. So I don't worry about it any more.