I must admit that I haven't been much of a fan of Intuit's File Doctor, in fact in several articles I wrote for 'the other guy' before IA came along, I reported that "File Doctor wasn't even qualified to be an intern, and needed to go back to medical school." I stopped trying to use File Doctor not long after it was released as a 'free standing' utility; then low and behold, Intuit announced they were imbedding it into QuickBooks Desktop products a couple of versions ago.
Let me clarify, I would still frequently run File Doctor on a 'sick file' that I knew had real problems just to see if it would do anything, and always my suspect was correct, it failed to do anything but report either "we couldn't find anything wrong with the file....we suggest you restore a back-up copy", or "we were unable to repair your file...we suggest you restore a back-up copy". Hum, when is "a" (File) Doctor suddenly a "we"? I wasn't expecting File Doctor to do anything and sure enough it didn't.
Of course I had already analyzed the problem and in most cases repaired the file with other proprietary methods, but I was experimenting to see if File Doctor had ever gotten beyond 'his' otherwise seeming 3rd year student status....not really until just a week or so ago.
As it happens a client sent me a file that 'would not open', I made a couple of windows copies for safety purposes and undertook my normal file analytics and repair steps, but at the same time I decided to let File Doctor 'do it's thing' just to see 'his' present capabilities. Well after about 25 minutes, File Doctor displayed a message I hadn't seen ever before, "We fixed the problem and created a new company file for you. Click Open New File to continue working in QuickBooks."
Sure enough when I attempted to open the repaired file, it actually 'opened'. "What, this actually worked for once....I was stupified (as "Stupified Jones from Lil' Abner" would have put it.)...golly, gee, whiz!"
Now the problem preventing the file from opening stemmed from a duplicate name, this can sometimes happen when QuickBooks attempts to 'validate' the file during the opening sequence and 'validation fails'. The QBWin file for the 'failed session' reflected the error as noted (actual 'customer name' redacted for privacy purposes) below.
LVL_ERROR--Verify Customer Name : Duplicate Customer names. Rcrd = 149 LVL_ERROR--Error: Verify Name list. Duplicate name encountered. Name: ############, ###########, # Records 150 (105) and 149 (106).
File Doctor repaired the file such that the file passed validation during the opening sequence enabling it to open. Isn't it amazing what a 'young (File) Doctor' can learn in 30-months on duty; I just hope he doesn't plan on doing 'surgery' anytime soon.!