I have to wholeheartedly agree with this statement (except for the part about Windows 7).

Stardock are very good at wetting everyone's appetite. It has been years since a stable update has been made for OD+. Betas and alphas aren't good enough. Give us a stable update. There are lots of bugs and compatibility issues to be fixed. The number of threads and posts in messiah's thread are a testament to that. Yes, I know Jeff posted an update 2 months ago saying that after Impulse's update next month OD will get the love it has been missing. However, lots of bug reports have been filed since then and no response from the devs, no feedback, nada, zilch. I hope nobody's going to come up with "Well if they spend all of their time reading the forums then where will they find the time to fix the aforementioned problems?". Saying that is silly. It really won't take them all day to write a couple of lines a few times a week. It just feels that there is no appreciation for all this testing that us paying customers are doing.

I know SD have been plagued with problems (Demigod anyone?), but a good company needs to maintain strong presence on all fronts. If there's more work that needs to be done then hire more people, pay people for overtime, do whatever it is that's necessary. I'm not trying to tell Stardock how to run their business, I'm outlining an attitude that they appear to lack. If they had it then I wouldn't be waiting over 2 years for an update for OD+.

It's really frustrating. I'm not a happy customer. Just like the poster above, I'm seriously considering whether to upgrade to OD+ 2.0 when it's released. Currently, the only motivation I have is to have a piece of software that's bug-free, because it has not been like that in a very long time.

Stardock has released more software than they can handle, it's quite obvious. And it's a shame, because the software really *was* top notch, and deserve further development.

Wow, this has to be the only place on the internet I've ever seen where people are actually agressively against someone presenting a fix to get an application to work properly. "OMG DON'T SHOW PEOPLE HOW TO 'HACK' STARDOCKS SOFTWARE TO MAKE ALL THE FEATURES WORK!" and all that.

From some of your tones, I assume that you feel that literally no software at all should ever run on x64 versions of windows without having 7 foot tall flaming letters reading "WE WON'T BE MISSING FEATURES IF YOU RUN US ON X64" plastered across them?  I mean, I know early in Vista's lifecycle (and XPx64 before it) there were a lot of things that were broke in x64 windows, but it's frankly been a long while since I've had trouble with it in general -- then again the only things in XP x64 that ever failed for me were hardware lacking drivers, and software that installed itself as a driver (Daemon Tools, for example).

The above about hacking od to make it work...

Ok, yes its wrong... but when a application in fact doesnt work...then all the issues are moot.

if a application is stated as not compatible but somebody comes up with a work aaround...then so be it.

The law wont protect non-working aspects of existing product.

Ie if one person creates something but the something is not working ...but somebody else makes it work. Thats ok.

Bad is if the else person then markets it or similar...   besides, if u are only modifying your own pgm and you know what u are doing...then the concerns are irrelevant.

Signed:

A person who once wrote his own version of early windoze 3.1 (and amiga os and APPLE OS (II not mac).

I consider the issues to be one of 'them being overloaded'  because they could easily do workarounds and use that till they get it fixed.

Fortunately there are 'startmenu' workalikes  that will work somewhat similar

I agree with you.  I took the requirements as minimums, not maximums.  Didn't occur to me that 32 bit meant 32 bit only, although that would be a stupid minimum since even W95 was 32 bit.   "Will not run properly on 64 bit" would have been a nice disclaimer.  Fixing these two minor issues would be even better.  How long does it take to recompile OD+ targetting a 64 bit processor/OS?     

Ive been using VistaStartmenu almost since i started using stardock... 

It does the job, though i would still prefer a complete replacement of the 'windows' start menu' still.

As far as 64bit veruss 32bit..

On my 64bit quadcore vista64 system with 6gig, I have a huge amount of 32bit and older applications running and much of it with no customization at all... 

I even have some old windows 3.1 still... and even older stuff in some cases.  

Naturally when I find a better version of a application or etc, i replace it, but I tend to retain all my past stuff on cd's.

Example:  

  I have had every version of OFFICE since the beginning, but run the latest when possible.

  In the startmenu issue, its more about stardock laziness or incapability especially when you can google the alternatives and try each one out.

I tried several and chose the one I liked most.  and though I have to still retain the 'original' windows taskbar still, its getting me there.

The only thing keeping me from hiding the windows task bar totally, is the rightmost task items are not showing in stardock when active apps do.