I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it.

I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run girlfriend in background mode with the sound turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say I 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 program, 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 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 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 a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system!

Then 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 any other version of girlfriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions!

The version I have right 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 reprogram. Frankly, I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than 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 GirlFriend Plus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend.

He discovered that GirlFriend Plus 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 of his space, so he can't load anything else.

One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife 1.0 is that it came bundled with FreeSexPlus 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreesexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins 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. Also Wife 1.0 is not portable it will not run his Laptop on trips.

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

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

Girlfriend 5.0 worked great for awhile. No conflicts with Golf Program or Drinking Buddies until he found it being pinged by Golf Pro 1.0.

Golf Pro 1.0 only runs pirated versions of Girlfriend and has never been a licensed user.

Girlfriend 5.0 has been deleted

What next?