Microsoft Money 2005 downloadable update does not download

When you start Microsoft Money 2005 for the first time, or after a reinstalling the software, the product will want to update itself. The Money 2005 update that the product is trying to download is a required update for Money 2005 to operate properly. A lot of problems were fixed in this update (see Article 269 for some of the known fixes).

The product version number of Money will become 14.0.x.1105, where 'x' is a number corresponding to the version of Money that you have - see Article 92. You can see this on Help->About in the Money window.

Sometimes this update doesn't download, giving you an error such as needing 100MB free or requiring an internet connection. If, after looking at articles such as Article 23 (which suggests opening a new file) or Article 463 (for Vista), you still have problems, then see below.

The next things to try are to check whether:

1. Create a new administrator account on your system, and try running Money from that user, let the download happen and then switch back to the original account (you can delete this 'temporary' account if it works.
2. You have got a valid TEMP environment variable (Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environment Variables) - check it points to a 'real' location on your machine (i.e. the directory exists)
3. Assuming you have more than 100MB hard disk space free, check you're not using an account with a quota on it (Open Windows Explorer, right click on the drive with the program installation on and then select the 'quota' tab (not present in all versions of Windows XP).
4. Reset all of the Internet Explorer settings to their default.
5. Follow the fix in Article 466 (SSL2 reset - even if you don't use Windows Vista)

A 'clean' user account usually fixes this problem, as the other points above might be automatically verified by the creation of this account. However, there are occasions where you don't want to use a new account on your system.

It is worth also noting that sometimes Microsoft do maintenance or there are problems with the download server. You can check the MSN Money status to determine this. See Article 254 for more details.