Since Quicken 2005, when the QIF file format was no longer supported, banks have had to pay to use the new QFX format for downloading financial transactions.
A friend of mine has reconsidered upgrading to Quicken 2007 because his credit union hasn’t paid Quicken the fee to support the web update feature. He’s going to stay with an older version and continue to download the QIF files.
Personally, most of my banking institutions such as Bank of America, Fidelity, Emigrant Direct and even a small-town bank in central Pennsylvania support Quicken 2007, so I’ll stick with my upgrade.
I do wish I could download a bit more easily (Emigrant’s more secure login causes major problems), and even download a single file rather than passing login data over the web through Quicken, but I’m doing alot more than I used to with Quicken 2003.
Regarding “passing login data over the web through Quicken,” you probably can do this. Run Quicken then log into your account via the browser as usual. Find the file you want to download and click download. Then browser will ask you whether you want to open or save the file, choose open. The file then will be downloaded into Quicken since you already installed Quicken and have the right file association. This way you don’t have to log into your account through Quicken.