Last year, after hearing how great it was for so long, a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 3.0 to Wife 1.0. He has found Wife 1.0 to be a resource hog, leaving him very little free space for other applications. Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-Subroutines, which further consumes valuable system resources. His system performance and resources seem to diminish with each passing day. At first, he thought Wife 1.0 might be infected with a virus, but other users have assured him that Wife 1.0 is behaving normally and this behavior should be expected due to the nature of the application.

My friend also discovered that Wife 1.0 installed itself in such a way that it can monitor all other system activity. He now finds that some programs such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 5.1 and PubNight 7.0 cannot run at all. If he attempts to launch them, Wife 1.0 complains about a sharing violation and crashes. He finds this behavior strange since he could run these programs just fine before he upgraded.

At installation, he found Wife 1.0 provides no option to bypass the installation of undesired add-ons such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release.

Some features he would like to see introduced in the upcoming Wife 2.0 release:

* A "Don't Remind Me Again" button.
* A Minimize button.
* An Install Shield that allows Wife 2.0 to be uninstalled at anytime without the loss of cache or other system resources.
* An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode.

I have decided to forego all the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking to Girlfriend 3.0. However, even that option has many problems. Apparently, you cannot install one version of Girlfriend before you completely uninstall the old version first. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. If the newer version finds a reference to the old version, Girlfriend will completely freeze until you reboot and remove the stray reference. I am told this is a long standing bug which I should have been aware of.

Also, versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. Another thing that stinks -- all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

***** BUG WARNING *****

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.0 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete all MSMoney files and take all your cache before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0. will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

***** BUG WORKAROUNDS *****

If you can afford it, try installing Mistress 1.0 on an entirely different system and never run any file transfer applications such as LapLink 6.0.

Another possible solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via an ISP under an anonymous name.