How reliable and accurate are these.   I don't need anything super accurate just something to teach the wife with and not discourage her with poor accuracy and FTF's.  She is still alittle scared of the noise and muzzle blast from my m4gery.

The "felt" quality of the DPMS is excellent.  Operation/weight/quality is almost identical to my Bushmaster .223 upper.

However, my DPMS .22lr M4 version had problems with failures-to-fire.  (Replacing my hammer spring helped, but it has still been selective about ammo).  Pretty accurate, but I haven't put a scope on it to test it well.

A friend of mine has 2 DPMS .22lr uppers - one the firing pin broke after ~4000 rounds (I think).   (He also has a CZ .22lr upper that broke the firing pin after about the same number of rounds).  He also had to re-crown one of the DPMS rifles to improve the accuracy, but was able to get ~1" groups at ~50yds.

IMHO, the quality of the DPMS is better than most - definitely a step above the CZ upper.  However, unless you spend a bunch of money, none of them are overly reliable.  It is my understanding that the complete uppers are more accurate than conversion units.

I have the DPMS bull barrel .22LR upper and mine has been flawless since the day I bought it.  I haven't had it that long, but I have about 2,000 rounds through it with no mechanical failures and only 1 FTF that went off when I fed it back through a second time.  I can easily get under one inch 10 shot groups at 25 yards and my 50 yard 10 shot groups max out at about 1.5-2.0 inches right now.  They could be better and most of the problem is me, but I am working on it and have gotten a few 1" groups at 50 yards.  I am just using a $40 1.5-4.5x variable scope and shooting off sand bags mostly.