I bought TaxCut Platinum based upon recommendations to avoid TurboTax due to privacy issues. I have used TurboTax for the past several years. I will be going back to it this year.

While preparing my daughter's very simple return, with itemized deductions, I had a couple of questions during the interview process. Mostly, I was seeking definitions of the terms in the interview questions. The help files didn't even provide detailed explanations of the questions asked in the interview. There was also no help available from any on-disk books except for the IRS's own instructions. TurboTax Deluxe, by contrast, includes Money Magazine's Income Tax Handbook as well as other useful help.

TaxCut Platinum also does not provide for supporting worksheets to enter data. TurboTax, however, allows you to itemize each vehicle's property tax (for example) on a worksheet. Then TurboTax uses the total for the IRS form. The worksheets print for you alone and are not submitted to the IRS. This is a very helpful way to keep itemized records of individual expenditures without writing each one down separately, but it isn't available from TaxCut Platinum.

TaxCut Platinum pretends to show your tax owed or refund amount as you go, but even on my daughter's relatively simple return the amount never changed during the data entry. The program apparently was not thoroughly tested, as the text sometimes was not visible, and no amount of scrolling attempts could make it so.

In spite of the on-line registration issues for TurboTax, I will be ordering a copy of it for my return, which involves numerous deductions, depreciation, employee business expenses, and other items that should not be that complicated. After all, I put up with the on-line registration from Microsoft for Windows XP.

I feel that TurboTax is worth the nuisance and minor intrusion. If you don't want to have Intuit know about your computer, buy TaxCut, but don't expect the sophistication from TaxCut that you get from TurboTax.