I gave in, Intuit has convinced me to move to the cloud.

So we signed up with Xero.com over a week ago and converted our company over. We still support over a dozen companies that use QuickBooks - all of them irritated with Intuit in general (why won't they fix problems that have been around for years instead of doing crap like this) and this may be the straw - it was for us. Xero converted our company data and we've been invoicing and paying bills and reconciling our bank and not missing QuickBooks at all.

So they were right, we did need an online account, just not with Intuit.