There's a problem in Quickbooks, where if you enter a short form for a country other than the USA, it rearranges the address values into the wrong fields.  For example, if you enter AUS into the country field, it will put AUS in the Note field, and it will combine the city, postal code, and state in the City field.  Various other entries produce different results.  This is true when typing the address directly into Quickbooks, and when updating via QODBC. If you use the full country name (i.e. Australia, Canada, etc.), then it actually populates the Country field.

So I can get around the problem simply by using the country name, rather than the short form.  However, the existing data already has the short form in the Note field, and I can't find that field using QODBC.  When I try to update the address with the correct information in the proper fields, it won't let me.  It tells me there are too many address lines, and this is because of that Note field.  How can I clear the value in the Note field?  Where is that field?

Yes, there is a problem with all versions of QuickBooks in it's Country validation. If the Country is not validated, the Country value (in this example: AUS) will be automatically moved by QuickBooks to the Note field that can't be accessed through QODBC as Intuit have left it out of the qbXML SDK. For example:

will display in the Customer table when using the following SELECTstatement in VB Demo:

SELECT FullName, BillAddressCity as City, BillAddressCounty as State,
BillAddressCountry as Country, Notes FROM customer unoptimized

You will need to correct the invalid Note entries using the QuickBooks User Interface.

It's not just in the Australian version.  I'm using the American Enterprise 6 version, and it occurs there too, as well as in the Canadian version.

It's clearly not putting the country in the Note field, since you can have different countries for Bill To and Ship To, and both put it in the "Note" field, on screen in Quickbooks.  Obviously, this field exists somewhere, or Quickbooks wouldn't be able to retrieve it.  So why can't we see it with QODBC?

Since it causes updates to fail, this is a significant deficiency.  It also makes initial data migration from Quickbooks impossible.  Going through thousands of customers in Quickbooks, and updating them manually, is not a viable solution.