Eliminating the “online updating” delays and errors when opening Money & Fixing Sunset Offline Issues

[UPDATED 4/26/2021, 11/7/2022]
It seems that even though Microsoft “tweaked” the Sunset edition of Money to no longer phone home for online updates and activation purposes, remnants of the online handshaking with MSN Money remain in the program* and I suspect that, because the address of the MSN Money servers has changed over the years, some serious delays are occurring in the program, as evidenced by the spinning arrow in the upper right corner of the Money menu bar (next to the help question mark) soon after the program is opened to “retrieve quotes, news and exchange rates”.  This one-to-two minute delay can get very annoying, as nothing can be done until the program finally gives up with the handshake, and can even cause errors when OFX files/statements are waiting to be processed.  If you aren’t paying attention to the spinning arrow, you may also invoke the message…

"You cannot perform this operation right now. There is an online operation in progress. Try again later."

On a side note, if you try to import a statement while Money is closed, you will get a dialog asking if you wish to start Money now.  By answering Yes, Money  will import all OFX files/statements BEFORE trying to access the servers, so any delay at least occurs after that process.

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Analysis

By running netstat /b  as an administrator while firing up Money, I got a list of servers that Money is attempting to access:

• TCP    168.0.44:64477     131.253.40.59:http     ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64478     137.117.100.176:http   ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64479     a-0003:http            ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64480     104.25.195.13:http     ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64481     104.25.194.13:http     ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64482     hans-moleman:http      ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]
• TCP    168.0.44:64495     hans-moleman:http      ESTABLISHED  [msmoney.exe]

The first entry is believed to be the MSNbot which used to be within www.msn.com/money  , but the address of that page is now
www.msn.com/en-us/money  , and that may be the first clue as to what is stalling the Money program.  I liked Ron’s statement in the Microsoft Money forum regarding those last two entries:

I have no idea why my MSMONEY is trying to connect to a Simpson's character Hans Moleman (also known as Ralph Melish).  Hmmm.  My first guess is that this is a programmer's joke...

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Resolution

Fortunately, there is a resolution to this issue and since Money is offline now, we’ll help it by using Windows Firewall to cut it off from the internet so that it doesn’t work so hard trying to resolve finding the MSN Money pages for a useless handshake.   Note that doing this will make any links to web pages like banks and MSN Money inoperable from with the Money browser.  Pocketsense scripts, MoneyQuotes, OFX / QIF file imports and file backups to Dropbox will continue to function properly though.

Money will simply act like your PC isn’t hooked up to the Internet.  As an added bonus, Money will also shut down quicker when exiting the program by doing this:

✅ Right-click on “Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security” which you will find in Programs > Windows Administrative Tools, and select “Run as Administrator”

✅ Click on “Outbound Rules”

✅ Select “New Rule”

✅ Select “Program”

✅ Select “This Program” and browse for the path, or you can also copy/paste the the appropriate path (red) in:

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\msmoney.exe
→→for 64-bit Windows, OR
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\msmoney.exe
→→for 32-bit Windows

✅ Select “Block this connection”

✅ Leave the defaults

✅ Then name your new rule something like “Microsoft Money block”

✅  Click Finish at the end.  At the top of the list of Outbound Rules, you should notice a red keep-out symbol in front of name to show Action:Block (if not, right-click and select “Enable Rule”)

One other adjustment that I advise:

✅ Customize your Money’s Home Page such that the only two modules are Reminders and Favorite Accounts.  Other modules like Bills & Deposits and Investment Performance can consume some time and prevent you from working with your file right away (and have even been known to occasionally cause the program to exit).

Now you’ll experience minimal delays, if any, when using your Money program, as it no longer will struggle to get hold of non-existent servers and process upcoming bills.

One other reminder: Make sure you have installed the Money Plus patch, as described in my article @ https://microsoftmoneyoffline.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/windows-8-64-bit-version-compatibility-with-sunset-money/

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*    Not a lot of time and effort was expended into bringing the offline “Sunset” version into fruition, because it still has many remnants of “online” coding, but fortunately they are all just minor annoyances, including…

click to enlarge

✅  Rather than creating a Watch account directly ⇑, just create an investment account, and then afterwards, in account settings – activate the Watch account option.

✅  All of the online options like “Customize Updates”, “Update Online Information”, “Read Summary Messages”, “MSN Alerts” and others, still exist within the program – just ignore them.

✅  Many of the Program tabs (BUDGET, INVESTING, PLANNING and TAXES) no longer function.  For instance, clicking on the INVESTING tab takes you to a MSN page, rather than the intended  Investing portal page within Money.  This behavior can be rectified by renaming urlmap.xml (admin privileges required; found in

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\WebCache
→→for 64-bit Windows, OR
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Money Plus\MNYCoreFiles\WebCache
→→for 32-bit Windows)

to  urlmap.xml_disabled.

Thank you sc489;  it’s been 10 years, since my BUDGET, INVESTING, PLANNING and TAXES tabs worked properly!

✅ Nathan Giard also discovered that by doing the same for four more files, not only does Money open up quicker, but the behavior of those tabs (and their sub-tabs) will be improved even further:

misurls.xml  to  misurls.xml_disabled
rooturlCDN.xml  to  rooturlCDN.xml_disabled
rooturl.xml  to  rooturl.xml_disabled
urls.ini  to  urls.ini_disabled

✅  You also want to avoid the Windows Live ID password option!  If you want password protection for your file, it should be a “local” offline version only.  I don’t know why this wasn’t cleaned up, as it can be very confusing.  The only thing I can think of is that for those that had the Live ID option enabled prior to the Sunset edition, a mechanism to remove it, needed to be retained.

click to enlarge

✅  Another means of improving the performance of Money, is invoking the “Nuke the Bills”  option once in a while.  Mark Fields reports:

I first performed a “Nuke the Bills” 😉 operation in 2007.  My file size was not big but I was running Win 95 and it was a different era of speeds.  I made this spreadsheet because it was a lot of work and I wanted to see if it was worth it.  It was.  

I next did a nuke process in 2020, almost  3 years ago.  Again the results were astounding in terms of performance.  When I look at the performance improvement as measured by the times, the short term pain and time to perform the process is gained back in perhaps a couple weeks.  I never measured the “time to close the file” but anecdotally I say it is noticeably better (hmm..two prepositions).   Also I did not measure how many bills were in the bill planner before and after.  Sometimes I’ve had a bill that was in the planner and the expense went away, such as a car payment, or perhaps something I bought that was 90 days, or an expense that went away for say lawn service that I switched vendors, etc.

Here’s the before and after data.

-ameridan