We get reader mail requesting help with technical problems. Who knows why. Some of our half-witticisms are detailed here. All the opinions expressed are ours, but we do have them. Of course we may be wrong, and we reserve that right. So there.

This note comes from DESPERATELY SEEKING TECHNICAL SUPPORT in Redmond, Wash.

Dear Internet Brothers,

I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and having some problems. 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 the DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run Girlfriend in background mode with the sound switched off. But I'm embarrassed to say that 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 my Golf program, 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 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, 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 virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 was still in my system! 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 Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions! Can you guys offer some technical advice.......?

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