I have figured out some workarounds for using with Buddy - for example, only having budgets for whole months or parts of months, i.e., never having budgets for a period that traverses a month boundary, which seems to avoid the issues I reported above. The program is still useful, and with these workarounds, and I can use it effectively to manage my budgets (and there is no real alternative on the N900 bar using an online budget manager).

However, it would be nice to see some signs of life from the developer - especially as this is still a paid application. I downloaded a new copy yesterday for my new N900 (old one stolen), and made a small contribution via PayPal to get my unlock code. I would have made a bigger contribution if I see and evidence the program is still being developed or supported, but apparently it is now abandonware.

For those who might find this useful, I wrote a very simple script that I use with fcron to make a backup of the Buddy data directory every night to a backup directory named with the current date. That way when Buddy crashes and loses data (usually because of a problem with the cached currency values) I have a very recent backup. Here is the script: