  Analytical and numerical estimates show that a charged Affleck-Dine
condensate will fracture into Q-balls only when the Hubble time is
significantly larger than the inverse soft-breaking mass of the field in
question. This would generally imply that the decay of the field into light
fermions will compete with Q-ball formation. We will show that for typical flat
directions the large field value will significantly suppress decays of the
condensate to fermions even if no baryon charge asymmetry exists. We will
consider the details of the decay process for a condensate that does carry
charge, and show that it is qualitatively different from that of an uncharged
condensate. Finally, we will consider the possibility of resonant production of
heavy bosons. We will show that this can have a strong effect on the
condensate. Contrary to intuition, however, our results indicate that boson
production would actually assist Q-ball formation in condensates with
significant charge.
