Gnucash on Windows XP

[Donald Allen]

I have a question and a workaround about/for Gnucash 2.9 on Windows.

A little background. I have done my personal and business work for
many years with as little use of Windows as possible. I won't rehash
the reasons, but I have been much better served by Linux and now
OpenBSD (Linux is good, OpenBSD is better, IMHO; easier to install,
administer, and has a much more consistent, professional feel to it).
Anyway, my wife has been doing the same for some years, but after an
update with Arch Linux on her machine completely destroyed the system
(this is the second time I've had a package update destroy an Arch
system; I'll spare you my rant about that distribution), we've decided
that the only thing that meets her (limited) computing requirements is
Windows (OpenBSD won't do it because Flash doesn't run, gnash is still
very beta, she likes to watch videos and doesn't want to reboot to do
it, Linux would do it, but it's very difficult, time-consuming, and
somewhat distro-dependent to get wireless working with WPA, which I'm
using, so it's Windows).

I installed the current release of Gnucash on her system and
immediately was reminded of a much-discussed display bug -- when you
open an account with years of transactions, the register shows only
the most recent displayed at the bottom of the window, with blank
space above them. In the past discussions of this (which I just
skimmed, since I wasn't affected by it then) I don't remember if
anyone mentioned a workaround -- if you hit page-up, the re-displayed
register fills the window as it should. You can then page-down to get
back where you were, and the display is now correct. So, that's my
offering of a workaround. I'd be surprised if I were the first one to
notice it (Chicago School of Economics kind of thinking :-), but I
mention it just in case.

Here's my question, addressed to the folks using gnucash on Windows
XP: is it reliable? Should I worry about her using it in anything
other than read-only mode? Does it consistently produce correct
answers and files? I do the money-management in our family and I do it
with Gnucash on Unix and the recent versions have been excellent --
pretty much bug-free and very stable. I'm asking for a reliability
assessment of the current Windows version.

Thanks in advance --
/Don Allen