To add myself to the set of Quicken alternative comments, I'd like to promote Mvelopes.com. It's an easy-to-use software as a service (SaaS) solution that runs as a full-page Flash application and uses a proactive budgeting approach rather than Quicken et al's reactive budgeting approach. With mobile browser access, it's possible to check the balance of each virtual envelope before making purchases, which helps make it proactive -- you can avoid spending money in the first place if the current balance of the relevant envelope isn't sufficient. In Quicken and other solutions, you enter in receipts after the fact and then get depressed about always spending more than you planned to in various categories.
I don't work for Mvelopes's company, but I am a very happy customer. I used Quicken from about 2002 to mid-2008, and I have to say that Mvelopes is far easier to use and keep up to date. It saves me at least two hours per week over my previous process, and I used to use Excel for budgeting because Quicken's budgeting modules suck, especially compared to Mvelopes's granular envelope spending and funding plan features. Mvelopes was designed with budgets at its core, which it calls envelopes, and envelopes are funded with each paycheck and other income sources as they come in.
Mvelopes isn't free, but it's competitive with the Quicken upgrade treadmill, and their online customer service is good enough. Bugs get fixed, and they are always adding features and improving usability further. It's reminds me a lot of the upgrade model of my employer, Salesforce.com. There's no software to install, besides Flash, and no action on your part needed to get updates. As a result of being a paid service, versus Mint.com, the data is private, and they don't load the UI with third party advertisements. Their privacy policy might not be as strong as the one at Salesforce.com, but it's good enough for me, for whatever that's worth
Hopefully, this helps..
Many will probably disagree with me on this, but I consider Windows to be a legacy operating system that I run on rare occasions within a VMware Server virtual machine. When run in VMware Server on a more modern desktop Linux operating system or even on a Mac, the risk likeliness of getting infected by viruses and malware is reduced by not using it often and limiting its use to specific applications that don't yet work on Linux or on a Mac. If its use is restricted to an internal accounting app, as an example, it would be difficult to get infected by an email virus or, if its firewall is enabled and VMware's NAT was in use, other standard Windows worms. As a result, it should be okay to use it past XP's end-of-life until it can run in Linux or Mac (or become web based).
When implementing the aforementioned scenario, it's possible to restrict IE browsing with IE URL Lock at https://www.moonlightdesign.org/urllock/ (shameless plug, though it's open-source) or, if your Windows apps don't use IE in any way (the reference pane in Office, as an example, uses IE to render reference info and search results), it's possible to use the proxy-is-localhost configuration approach or an upstream block to restrict browsing.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson