Happily, I can report that both programs are working perfectly.

I now leave the PC on all the time and so don't do daily restarts as before - this means that the Birthday Alerts do not get updated unless I remember to hit the refresh button.
Is there a way to have the program automatically refresh every X hours?
Presumably, I could schedule a task to close it down and restart but it would be nicer to have this as a program feature.