Error: Unable to start IntuitUpdateService, when installing Point of Sale on Windows 8.

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 Windows 8 is hitting the market. Will QuickBooks Point of Sale work on it?

 Here is what Intuit has said:

When installing Point of Sale Versions 10 or earlier in a new Windows 8 environment, you see the error:

Unable to start the IntuitUpdateService Error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

When you click OK, the installation rolls back and terminates and the product is not installed.

Why this is happening

The ESD shared component which controls patching is triggering this error.

The ESD component in the POS versions encountering this error is dependent on .Net 3.5 being present on the operating system.  On all POS supported operating systems prior to Windows 8, .Net 3.5 was either pre-installed on the OS, or pushed as a critical auto update, therefore those earlier versions of POS did not include .Net 3.5 as a prerequisite to install.
On Windows 8, the .Net 3.5 profile is not enabled by default. This results in the error above when the ESD Updater service attempts to start during install, and cannot do so due to .Net 3.5 not being present on the OS.
The reason why POS 2013 does not encounter this error is that the ESD stack included in POS 2013 is the latest stack, and is dependent on .Net 4.0 which is both a prerequisite to installing POS 2013, and is already enabled by default on Windows 8.
Note: This only occurs on computers with a clean install of Windows 8, and you should not experience this error if you’ve upgraded your existing operating system to Windows 8.
How to fix it
  1. Right-click the Windows start button and choose Control Panel.
  2. Select Turn Windows Features on or off.
  3. Select the .NET Framework 3.5 checkbox and then click OK.
  4. Install Point of Sale
NOTE: After performing those steps, previous versions of POS will now install successfully and perform as expected. This has been verified with POS versions V7-V10.
 Hope this helps!