Quickbooks Enterprise 13 is filling the temp folder with dbdata11.dll and Intuit says it isn’t their problem

Quickbooks Enterprise 13 generates millions of files/folders with dbdata11.dll junk files in the temp folder. Intuit support isn’t much help.

This is an ongoing issue for one of my clients. It started a few days ago, they came in and the computer said the hard drive was full. They assumed, logically, that it was a backup that was stuck in a loop, backing up itself again and again. They got as far as they could and called me in the afternoon in a panic.

After some looking, I found that the c:\Windows\Temp folder was hogging over 700GB of space. In fact, after it took FOREVER to load the folder contents, there were over 1 million folders each containing a 700k dbdata11.dll. The only thing that has changed recently is that they upgraded to Quickbooks Enterprise versions 13. A google search resulted in some links referring to qbw32.exe and SQL Anywhere ADO.NET Data Provider Utility for SQL Anywhere as the application calling and using this particular dll file.

I took the usual steps, I deleted the temp folder contents… nuts… windows won’t let me! So I ran CCleaner and set the temp folder as a custom location and let it clean it. You can take a guess how long it took to delete a couple million files and folders well under a meg… hours! I got the folder cleaned out, and did several malware scans, all of which came up clean (minus some cookies and jar files in quarantine). I restarted Windows a couple times and it seemed to be fixed.

The next day, maybe an hour after the client comes in to work it start up again and slams the computer, it is nearly unusable with that much disk activity. I got Intuit on the line, bounced through a few different support agents, jumped through some hoops, spent a couple hours on hold. In the end, they told me is was malware, and even did a google search for the dbdata11.dll to show me how it is malware. Of course, these were links to pages that indicated that it was NOT generally considered malware, but is associated with SQL Anywhere and this proves it is not a QB issue. So I showed them 2 Intuit Customer Forum articles that reference that specific dll file… long pause… They said they needed to get a higher end support agent and call me back. We arranged for a call back the next day, no phone call, no surprise.

The fix as it stands today is I have made a script that the client can run when the computer slows down that kills the dbextclr11.exe process, which is run by the qbdataserviceuser23 user and the description is iAnywhere.SAClrClassLoader. Not a quickbooks related problem? SURE it isn’t, anything you say Intuit.

Here is my script to kill this process and then run CCleaner running the default setting to delete the contents of the c:\Windows\Temp folder in a kill-dbextclr11-process.bat. I also have it scheduled to run at 10pm via a scheduled task in case it starts up even when Quickbooks is closed at night.