Ok, so this has been around for many years, but it still makes me giggle when I haven't seen it for a while, and maybe there is still someone out there who's never seen it before.

18 months ago, a customer of mine upgraded from Drinking Mates 4.2, which he had used for many years without any trouble, to Girlfriend 1.0.
However, there are apparently conflicts between these two products and the only solution was to try and run Girlfriend 1.0 with the sound turned off. To make matters worse, Girlfriend 1.0 is incompatible with several other applications, such as Lads Night Out 3.1, Football 4.5, and Playboy 6.9. Successive versions of Girlfriend proved no better. A shareware program, Party Girl 2.1, which he tried, has many bugs and left a virus in his system, forcing him to shut down completely for several weeks.

Eventually, he tried to run Girlfriend 1.2 and Girlfriend 1.0 at the same time, only to discover that when these two applications detected each other, they caused severe damage to his hardware. He then upgraded to GirlFriendPlus 1.0 (marketing name: Fiancee 1.0), only to discover that this product soon had to be upgraded further to Wife 1.0. While Wife 1.0 tends to use up all available resources, it does come bundled with FreeSex Plus and Cleanhouse 2.02. Shortly after this upgrade, however, he found that Wife 1.0 could be very unstable and costly to run. Any mistakes he made were automatically stored in Wife 1.0's memory and could not be deleted. They then resurfaced months later when he had forgotten about them. Wife 1.0 also has an automatic Diary, Explorer, SMS and E-mail Filter, and can, without warning, Launch TurboStrop and Whinge. These latter products have no Help files, and he has to try to guess what the problem is.

He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes. No mention of this particular "feature" was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity.
He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5 and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8, and the BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day. Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

1. A "Don't Remind Me Again" button
2. A Minimize button
3. An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of Cache and other system resources.
4. An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the systems' 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 found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 as well as Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 FIRST. Other users say this is a long standing bug which I should have been aware of. Apparently the versions of GirlFriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You'd think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the unistall program for GirlFriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. The two things that concern me most are:

1. All versions of Girlfriend that I've used are totally "object oriented" and only support hardware with gold plated contacts.
2. Second, all versions of GirlFriend continually popup annoying messages about upgrading to Wife 1.0.

*** BUG WARNING ***
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 all MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

*** BUG WORK AROUNDS ***
To avoid the above bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications such as Laplink 6.0. Also, beware of similar shareware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0. The problem with running Wife and Mistress at the same time is the inability of the processor to multi-task. There is a shareware patch to the thread manager that will allow you to run two or more copies of GirlFriend at the same time or Wife and FemaleFriend at the same time. Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via a UseNet provider under an anonymous name, Here again, beware of the viruses which can acccidently be downloaded from the UseNet. Running more than 1 copy of any version of Wife is still unsupported except in certain regions of Utah and Arizona.

*** ADDITIONAL NOTES ***
I've heard there is a new version of GirlFriend Lite that you can get. It is shareware and requires a lot less maintenance than previous versions. Flirt 1.2 beta 2 can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.relations.org/fem . When Flirt is completed, you will be able to upgrade for a fee and allow running of Wife and Mistress at the same time. Current bug reports on Flirt state that if Wife and Mistress are running at the same time, they just trash the Hard Drive and quit.