Last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child- Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as PokerNite 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and Pubnite 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when launched (even though these apps worked fine before).

Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

• A "Don't Remind me Again" button.
• Minimize button
• An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option of uninstalling at any time without loss of Cache and other system resources.
• An option to run the network driver in "promiscuous mode" which would allow the system's Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful.

I myself decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I have found many problems... Apparently you cannot install girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first; otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other users have told me that this is a long-standing bug that I should have been aware of. You'd think they'd have fixed such a stupid bug by now!

To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another thing that sucks is that all versions of Girlfriend continually popup annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then for some reason Mistress 1.1 won't install, claiming insufficient resources.

To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications (such as Laplink or Interlink) between the two systems.

Also, beware of similar shareware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0.

Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via Usenet provider under an anonymous name. Here again, beware of viruses that can be inadvertently downloaded from Usenet.