In case you didn't know, the apps on your iPhone and iPod Touch never close unless they crash, are shutdown due to your device running out of memory, or you manually close them. The problem is that there isn't a close app button for any app that is inside of the application. Pressing the Home button and switching to another app doesn't close the app that you were in, so how do you close them?
Well, after doing a search on Apple's Support site I found 2 solutions, either power down the unit (press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of device for a few seconds until a red slider appears, and then slide the slider), and the other solution is missing a critical step. First off, you must be running iOS 4 or later for the second solution. If you are, then do the following:
- Double-tap the Home button to display a menu of recent applications.
- Touch and hold one of the running application icons at the bottom of the screen, until they begin to shake.
- Click the red minus on the icon for each application you wish to close.
- Press the Home button to return to the recent applications menu.
Steps 2 and 4 are missing from Apple's directions at iPhone and iPod touch: What to do when applications close unexpectedly while in use. It would be nice if Apple allowed comments on their Troubleshooting articles like Microsoft does, even if they are only viewable by Apple, but they unfortunately don't. BTW, the reason that I needed to figure this out is because iTunes would not let me do a sync with my mailbox because the Mail application was running. I hope this helps anyone else who runs into a similar problem.
If you have QuickBooks 2009 (or earlier) and/or Quicken 2009 (or earlier) installed on Windows Vista (or later) and have installed the latest updates to Windows Live Essentials 2011, you may be in for a surprise. First off, I will say this it is all fixable and that you do not need to upgrade either of your Intuit product installations to the latest version, but it may scare you to find out that QuickBooks and/or Quicken are broken. To top it all off, after you fix both of those installations, they will break your Windows Live Messenger installation, but that too can be easily fixed and it hasn't broken anything that I have noticed.
I didn't put the whole thing together until today, but when I spoke with a guy at Intuit a few days ago, to re-register QuickBooks after a reinstall, he mentioned something about QuickBooks defaulting to using Windows Live if you are running Windows 7 and tried a hard core sell for me to update to QuickBooks 2010 (which will be obsolete and replaced later this month). After you install the updates for Windows Live Essentials 2011, your QuickBooks and/or Quicken installations may become corrupted due to several reasons, including a change in key encryption that was made in another Windows patch.
If you get an error message stating that your QuickBooks installation is corrupted, you will need to remove your current installation and reinstall (hopefully from your server installation). If you have moved (my case), or can't remember your old licensing information, you may need to call Intuit to re-register and update your contact information. After fixing that, my Quicken installation failed, but I was able to recover by doing a re-installation over the current installation. However, both of those re-installations broke Windows Live Messenger. You can fix your Windows Live Messenger installation by doing a full repair of Windows Live Essentials 2011 from Control Panel / Programs and Features. After doing all the above, I'm back to normal and running Windows Live Essentials 2011, something that the Intuit guy said could not be done.
I wish I remember more of what the Intuit guy had said, but he was trying to blame Microsoft for something that he said that they had broken. However, the truth is that Intuit incorrectly coded their products to use settings that were designed only to be used by Windows and not by applications. If you run into the same issues, I hope that this helps.