Upgrade Girlfriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0

This computer software story was passed on to me by my daughter, who received it second hand (or third, or ...) by email. Origin unknown:

Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog, leaving very little system resource for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon 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 lauched at system initialisation 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 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.:

• A "Don't remind me again" button
• Minimize button
• 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.

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 on top of 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 conficts 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 uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.

Another thing that sucks -- all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

Jim's comment on above bug
There are in fact two versions of this bug, and it seems to be a matter of luck which one you get afflicted with. The version described is the milder of the two. With the worse version, before uninstalling itself Wife 1.0 uses the Divorce protocol to install Lawyer 1.0 (and sometimes also Lawyer 1.1, Lawyer 1.2 and Lawyer 1.3 as well).

Lawyer (any version) will run for an indeterminate but lengthy period constantly consuming all resources. When it eventually ends it automatically installs Alimony 26.5, which removes MSMoney and any other financial application as soon as you install it. The core of Lawyer 1.0 remains as a TSR during this time, crashing the system as soon as any attempt is made to stop Alimony 26.5 or to interfere with its operation. This sometimes leads to fatal breakdown of the entire system.

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