Since I'm not a bit football fan, I figured I'd do my taxes tonight instead of watching the Super Bowl.  Unfortunately, I hit a little snag.

I installed my copy of Intuit Inc.'s TurboTax 2011 on my Mac mini running Mac OS 10.7.  After installing it and completing the 15 minutes worth of updates, I fired it up expecting to see a "welcome to TurboTax" or "let's get started by importing your old return" dialog.  Instead, I saw nothing past the registration screen.  TurboTax was running, but the application didn't have any windows open.  I selected "New Tax Return" from the File menu, but nothing happened.  I restarted TurboTax and then I restarted the OS - still nothing was happening.  Uh, something was broken.

I installed the same software on my MacBook Air running Mac OS 10.6 just to see what would happen.  Some Internet searches indicated Intuit had some issues with their software on 10.7.  The same thing happened - TurboTax just sat there doing nothing!

I figured there was something up, so I put on my old-school Unix hat, opened Terminal.app, and ran TurboTax in a terminal window.  No messages were generated up until.. yep, you guessed it, I selected "New Tax Return" from the File menu.  Here it is:

(orion:19:23)% /Applications/TurboTax\ Home\ Business\ 2011.app/Contents/MacOS/TurboTax\ 2011 
2012-02-05 19:23:43.862 TurboTax 2011[90253:903] Encountered TPS error (120)
zosFileException: full file name is /Applications/TurboTax Home Business 2011.app/Contents/Resources/Forms/1040_11.formset/Contents/MacOS/._fdi11cv.3pe
                  open mode is 1
                  data mode is 1
                  share mode is 4
 Inherited info follows
zpExceptionBase: error code =   120 source file = /Users/devmac/Documents/dev/official/2011.r08.003/source/Src/Low/P/OSFS/osXPResF.cpp, line 1381

The TPS error cracked me up at first (remember Office Space?) but I quickly realized that yep, there was some software bug in TurboTax.  Specifically, it looked to be centered around one of the 1040 forms.

I did some Internet searches on these errors but didn't find anything relevant.  Maybe it was a bad update that got pushed out at the last minute?  Rather than uninstalling TurboTax and then starting it without performing software updates, I decided to install it on Windows 7.  The updates took about one minute and the "New Tax Return" function worked!

Hopefully Intuit will fix their 1040 form errors on their Mac version of TurboTax, soon.  Although, I suppose I don't really care anymore since the Windows version works!

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