Bug Warning

from Itai Dor-on at silicom@netvision.net.il on the NT Security mailing list

Created on Sun, 24 Aug 1997
Last Updated: 27 Sep 97

Bug Warning

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 resources 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 phenomena is 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 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 dim inish with each passing day.

The feature he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0 include:

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 conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You 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 pop-up little annoying messages about the advantage of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

Undocumented Bug

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 Microsoft Money 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 that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0.

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 accidentally be downloaded from the UseNet.

 

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