I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and having some problems. I've been running DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have conflicted with it. I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run Girlfriend in background mode with the sound switched off. But I'm embarrassed to say that I can't find the switch to turn it off. I just run them separately, and it works OK.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Golf programme, often trying to abort it with some sort of timing incompatibility.

I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0 but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said that I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and that 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 that, I installed Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus. I 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 virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 was still in my system! I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature that I didn't know about, that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions! The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of Girlfriend, it is written in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less re-program.

Frankly I think that there is too much attention paid to the look and feel and not enough 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-orientated.' A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of Girlfriend to GirlfriendPlus 1.0, 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 Fiance 1.0. So he did. But soon after that, you have 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.

One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife is that it came bundled with FreeSexPlus1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug and Play items he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything.

And, although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that he can't turn off.

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

Anybody out there able to offer technical advice.....