@napleseye - Fascinating. I just went back and re-read your post. Pretty sure the two (rather random) angry replies to it were intended as responses to earlier Intuit Employee boilerplate nonsense (that condescending blather that periodically punctuates this discussion), and not to your solution -- or at least that's the only way they make any kind of sense at all

I'm on a mac, so the details are different, but I am successfully running QB 2022 without having to log in online by using a similar method: I have a firewall-type program called Little Snitch that can block outgoing connections and have disallowed QB from making any outgoing connections at all. If anyone else is on a mac and wanting more details, let me know.