I finally decided to try again and installed the latest updates and patches for IE… with my fingers crossed, I opened UltraTax. Low and behold, it finally works as expected! I can finally roll out office-wide security updates and version upgrades for Internet Explorer. I’m not exactly sure which UltraTax update finally fixed the problem or when, but rest assured, it works now 🙂

Back in April I was one of the few to post about UltraTax Errors resulting from IE 11 updates. I later posted a follow-up indicating more more updates that would break Ultra Tax once it was found out to be an issue not tied to any specific version (eg: all versions of Internet Explorer are being patched with cumulative updates).

Previously, switching from opening a client profile and back to the home screen was taking forever (literally minutes). Only after waiting long enough to see a scripting error did I realize UltraTax actually uses an embedded IE browser to display the home screen data (eg: changes to IE can break UT). This of course led me to track down what changed in IE and begin posting to the Thomson Reuters forums to let tax and accounting firms know how to spot and correctly address the issue.

TR was telling people how to disable the home screen, which limits the usefulness of the software for a lot of the data firms rely on (who opened a client last, when, for how long, etc) from said screen. So I decided it was in the community’s best interest to post a proper workaround instead of their idea which disabled an important part of Ultra Tax.