Wife Software

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0. 
Much to his chagrin, he learned a little too late that it was a memory 
hog that left very little system resources for other applications. He 
is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning child-processes which 
are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular 
phenomena was included in the very well-done product brochure or the 
skimpy documentation, though other users have informed him that this 
was to be expected due to the nature of the application.

A peculiar aspect of Wife 1.0 is that it writes itself to the boot 
sector in such a way that it launches itself at system initialization 
and constantly monitors all system activity. He's finding that some
applications such as PokerNight 3.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 4.0 
are no longer able to run at all. In fact, these programs crash his 
system whenever he selects them, even though they'd always worked fine 
before. And removing this Wife 1.0 from the boot sector is almost 
impossible short of running fdisk and reformatting the hard drive.

At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option to disallow the installation
of undesired plug-ins such as MotherInLaw 2.2 and the BrotherInLaw beta
release.

Additionally, despite the fact that Wife 1.0's system requirements 
increase over time, its performance and functionality seems to be 
diminishing with each passing day!

The features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0 include:
- A "Don't remind me again" button,
- A minimize button,
- An InstallShield feature that allows  Wife 2.0 to be uninstalled 
  without the loss of cache and other valuable system resources, 
  and an option to run the network in promiscuous mode which would 
  enable the system probe function to work with far less interference.

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! Can you believe that? You must first uninstall Girlfriend 1.0. Other
users say this is a long-standing bug which I should have been aware of. 
It seems that the different versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over 
shared use of the I/O port. (You'd think they'd have fixed such a stupid 
bug by now.)

And if this weren't enough, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0
doesn't always work well. It is getting a reputation for leaving
undesirable traces of the application throughout the system.
Oh yes, and another thing that sucks - ALL versions of Girlfriend
continually pop-up little annoying messages about the advantages of
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 MS Money files 
without prompting you first, then perform the uninstall itself. And 
from then on, 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 avoid running file transfer applications such as LapLink 6.0. Be
careful of what you place into MS Briefcase and be alert to the fact that
similar shareware applications have been known to carry viruses that may
infect Wife 1.0. Another work-around involves running Mistress 1.1 via a
UseNet provider under an anonymous name. Here again, be watchful of viruses
which can accidentally be downloaded.