I was forced into doing Blood on the Ice wrong, that is I was on my way to return the ring to Viola Giordano's house when i ran into the guard stationed by the dead body. Before I could dodge him he warned me off and the quest started. I questioned the witnesses and then ran to return the ring to Viola's house before she returned home. That took me along the same route as you do to follow the blood trail, so of course I got close enough to Hjerim to trigger the objective to find out about getting into Hjerim. That left the "examine the crime scene" part of the quest still open in my journal through the rest of the quest.

Later I had trouble finding Calixto to ask him about the amulet and finally used player.moveto to locate him. He turned out to be wandering around the streets randomly when he should have been at the museum. I was able to sell the amulet to him, and finish the quest by talking to Wuunferth and going back to the Stone Quarter. Killed Calixto, got the update to tell Jorleif, went to talk to him, told him, got the usual "thanks" dialog, and then nothing.... The quest remains open in my journal

I've tried setstage m11 150 and setstage m11b 150 both and nothing happens, the quest still appears as open. Is there anyway I can get this thing closed or am I stuck with a permanently open quest?

Thanks

Just to update, this quest still appears in my journal. I've progressed in the Stormcloak Questline to the point where I have the option to buy Hjerim, but when I pay for it the option to decorate never appears after I visit the house. When I enter the house the bed is not changed -- it's still the single bed with furniture piled on it and there's no option to sleep on it.

Has anyone had this particular series of problems?

Thanks.

Final, I hope, update. After poking around and Googling, I finally found an explanation of what caused my problem. Further poking brought me to the UESP discussion page for Hjerim in which someone mentioned using completequest ms11 and/or completequest ms11b. (The completequest command is not listed among the console commands on the UESP wiki, so I had no idea there even was such a critter.) This removed the quest from my journal and fixed the problem of the dialog options for decorating the house not appearing in Jorleif's list. The basic bed and chest did still not show up in the house after purchase. I bought the cleanup and bedroom, and the bed showed up but not the chest. However, the old bed and chairs are http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v487/Lerf1950/Skyrim/2012-03-21_00001.jpg. The bed is usable, so I can live with it.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that anyone else has this problem--that's the solution I found.