I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and I've been
having some problems. I've been running the same version of
Drinking-Buddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the
Girlfriend releases I've tried have always conflicted with it.

I hear that Drinking-Buddies won't crash if Girlfriend is run in
background mode, and the sound is turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say
can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately
and it works okay.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf programme
often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility.

I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might
see better performance from Girlfriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and
other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with
Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run
Girlfriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run
properly. He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled
itself.

Shortly after, I installed Girlfriend 3.0 beta - and it gave me a virus.
had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while. I very
cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe
first, and also installed a virus protection programme. It worked okay for
a while until I discovered that Girlfriend 1.0 was still there.

I tried running Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 installed, but
Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature I didn't know about; it automatically senses
the presence of any other version of Girlfriend and communicates with it
in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both.

The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still problems.
Like all versions of Girlfriend, it is written in some obscure language I
can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly, I think there is too
much attention paid to the look and feel rather than to the desired
functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you
usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I've never liked how
Girlfriend is totally object-oriented.

A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of Girlfriend to
GirlfriendPlus1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of
Girlfriend. He discovered that GirlfriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if
you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0.

So he did, but soon after that he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he
describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space, so he
can't load anything else.

He'd decided to go with Wife 1.0 because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus
But it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometime
prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-ins he wanted
to try. On top of that Wife 1.0 only runs on a well warmed-up system.
Also, although he didn't ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw, which
has an automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off.

I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he'd heard that if
you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete
MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't
install because of insufficient resources.................