Earlier today my copy of Quicken 2006 for Mac began refusing to download transaction activity from any of my bank or credit card accounts, complaining about an “OL-249” error. It took a bit of Googling to figure out what was going on, so I thought I’d post the solution here.

Short version: you need to download this fairly obscure patch from the Quicken website and install it. You should do this after updating via the regular File/Check for Updates option, and it is in addition to the updates provided via that route.

Longer explanation: from what I can tell, the certificates included with Quicken 2005, 2006 (which I use), and 2007 had relatively short expiration dates. They expired, and for some reason either weren’t or couldn’t be updated via the built-in update mechanism. Hence the additional patch. Why they couldn’t do this via a regular update push I’m not sure, but at least they made them available somehow — I would have half expected them to just tell everyone to upgrade.

Once I ran the installer against Quicken.app, online transaction downloading worked fine once again.