Thank you all for the kudos... I am persistent and cantankerous if nothing else :)
For those having to replace the homepage URL with something else; yes, I noted that. For me, I replaced "/homepage" with "/exportdata" and it worked. I suspect that "/exportquickbooksdesktop" is a bit more direct path though. Keep in mind, these are relative paths and could change at anytime as well. Intuit could decide they don't want this information out in the wild and either take it down or just revamp the whole QBO interface in the interest of "upgrades and improvements" and render these steps useless, who knows!
I never did find any solution or workaround for the disappearing gear in IE11. And, of course it only happens in IE - the gear does not disappear in any other browsers. I suspect this has to do with some incompatibility in their rendering of the page but really, who knows (and who cares). Still yet, all the aforementioned statements about incompatibilities with IE are just plain wrong! The conversion tool is an ActiveX component and _only_ runs in IE therefore no other browser (on any other platform) will work, period. As of this writing (02/11/2020) there are just no options outside IE11 on Windows 10 which is where the need for handcranking the /homepage to /exportdata URL comes in since the gear disappears soon as you click on it.
For those switching from QBO to QB:Mac ... Keep in mind that the Mac version of QB is a totally different product and it is documented in a couple places throughout the KB articles that file format compatibility it not necessarily guaranteed. I'm a Mac user by nature, run Windows 10 in VMware and looked at QB:Mac and sadly, it just didn't make the cut... QBD for Windows or bust :(
All none the less, I'm happy to hear others having success!
-brian
