Tech Support Part II

Desperately seeking technical support! I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend 5.0 and having some problems. I've been running the same version of Drinking Buddies 1.0 for years as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it.

I hear that Drinking Buddies won't crash if you minimize Girlfriend with the sound off, but since 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 coexisting with Golfware, often trying to abort my Golf program 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, I consulted a friend who has experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and eventually it would require a Token Ring upgrade to run properly. He was right.

As soon as I purged my cache, Girlfriend 2.0 uninstalled itself. Shortly after that, I installed a Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus.

After a hard drive clean up and thorough virus scan, I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0.- this time using a SCSI probe and virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 wasn't completely uninstalled! I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has an unadvertised feature that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, resulting in the immediate removal of both versions!

The version I have now works pretty well, but, like all versions, there are still some problems. The Girlfriend package is still written in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less reprogram. And I've never liked how Girlfriend is totally object-oriented. A year ago, a friend upgraded his version to GirlfriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate-and-Stay-Resident version. He discovered girlfriendPlus1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 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 FreeSex 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSex (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 Mother-In-Law 1.0, which has an automatic pop-up feature 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 MSMoney files before uninstalling itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway, due to insufficient resources.

Is anybody out there able to offer technical advice?