I'm getting the sneaking suspicion ...

.. that XFire blows.

So far: Download was great, installation flawless. So far so good.

Registration, however, was a pain. Why the hell do they want to know how old I am? At least the spam-rider in the registration was opt-in and not opt-out, so hasty clicks wouldn't be detrimental, but after a few hours' wait, I'm still not registered. Yes, you bonehead, my password is right. I've done the 'recover my password' dance twice, and I've yet to see a recovery message hit my mailbox or my mail server, for that matter -- so don't talk to me about spam blockers and whitelists and crap: I'm tailing the fucking maillog on my server, and I can see what's happening.

I can only conclude that XFire sucks. Nice presentation, barely-adequate registration (with points off for birthdays and spam) and NO points at all for usability since I can't even log on!

update: An anonymous rep from xfire sent me e-mail and suggested I try to log on again. They had a bit of a Db problem that week, it appears, and new subscriptions were probably failing to get actually put into authentication. However, upon trying the client, I noticed that it's an extremely chrome-infested CPU- and screen-hogging IM. It's too bad it has such uses as joining the TeamSpeak server your friend is on, for instance, because I end up rebooting my machine twice as often now due tot he memory leaks (the Corel Effect).

Marginally good features, terrible resource pig.