Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A very bad experience
I had read the poor reviews but foolishly thought I'd give it a try. After all, it was so useable in the past, could it have fallen so far so fast. Unfortunately, the answer is YES.The entire installation was disappointing, with the excessive marketing of their products, the subtle hiding of options to not get further emails, links to state products that were nonexistant, information that was inaccurate on their web pabes, and many, many more things. Intuit - You have lost a customer. I'm extremely disappointed in your product and how you treat your customers. This will be the last purchase of an Intuit product I make; and I have multiple products.
Rating:  - A Mixed Bag
I'd give TurboTax a middle grade. I understand Intuit's concern about inappropriate copying, but I don't like the scheme they've chosen. On the other hand, I also think that they have gone some way to correct the worst parts of that scheme and I have seen no evidence of the alleged spyware aspects. The functional part of the software is basically good, but is not as easy to use as I'd like. I had one technical glitch, for which support was no help, and I really dislike chat-based support rather than primary free phone support.The copy protection would have been completely unacceptable to me if it had continued to be impossible to access forms mode on a computer other than the one activated for print/e-file, or if the need for activation/re-activation had not been changed to expire after October 15th (allowing printing of previous year's return from a new machine, for example). Otherwise, Intuit provided me enough information to know that if I wanted to work on one machine, then print off another, I needed to activate the software on the printing machine, then install on the working machine. I'm still not terribly happy about the memory footprint of the copy protection, which persists until actually uninstalled, whether I'm running TurboTax or not. The activation method (sending a random number, getting back a matched code) doesn't appear to qualify as spyware, and my firewall hasn't detected any unauthorized attempts by C-Dilla to phone home. The product itself is much as in past years, reasonably easy to use, occasionally maddening. (Just try to figure out where in the interview to go back and modify the amount of a moving expense reimbursement not reported on a W-2! I run into something like that every year.) The process to purchase and download state software (2 states) froze up after I'd authorized the purchase, but when I tried it a second time it recognized that I'd already paid and ran to completion, and I haven't been double-billed (so far; knock on wood!). For some reason, the explanatory videos are all silent in TurboTax on my computer, although when I play the .avi files directly using Windows Media Player, they're fine. I got a lot of useless advice via chat support (uninstall and reinstall all the multimedia components of Windows, keep uninstalling/re-installing TurboTax, etc.) and ultimately no help. As I said, I've had some issue with TurboTax for most every year of the 10 or so I've used the product, and being limited to chat support is EXTREMELY frustrating. (I don't have a CD-writer, so can't comment on any interference there caused by the copy protection.) All in all, a mixed bag!
Rating: - TurboTax Deluxe 2002
In the last ten years, TurboTax is the only tax software I bought and used, but not anymore. With Activation code and DRM, I simply won't touch it, period.
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