Related to this issue, I want to ask something else.
It's pretty much still about change, though. And though I'm mostly sure about the answer, I just want to make sure because by this point I'm getting superstitious.
Change is the reason why all of what we call 'weird behaviour' happens, as far as I can see. So it would stand to reason that a wallet.dat file can only be moved around from one OS to another as long as it doesn't actually engage in transactions. If it just sits there and doesn't send or receive money then no harm's done, no? It's when we engage in transactions that we have to start worrying about always using one and only wallet.
It's pretty much still about change, though. And though I'm mostly sure about the answer, I just want to make sure because by this point I'm getting superstitious.
Change is the reason why all of what we call 'weird behaviour' happens, as far as I can see. So it would stand to reason that a wallet.dat file can only be moved around from one OS to another as long as it doesn't actually engage in transactions. If it just sits there and doesn't send or receive money then no harm's done, no? It's when we engage in transactions that we have to start worrying about always using one and only wallet.
Change is one reason, but not the only reason that it's a bad idea to try to run the Bitcoin-Qt client in multiple places at once.
Another reason is the possibility of a double-spend attempt if one wallet send some bitcoins, and the other wallet hasn't seen the transaction yet for some reason.
But in general, as long as none of the instances of the wallet are sending or receiving any transactions, and you are not clicking on the button to create new addresses, you should be ok to run multiple copies of the same wallet.dat file on multiple systems. (I can't imagine what the purpose is of running the same wallet in multiple places and not sending, receiving, or generating addresses)
