New, Open, and Preferences Disabled

Hi,
I just downloaded a trial of Parallels Desktop 10 on Yosemite and imported a machine image I downloaded from Modern.IE. I want to try another image from the same web site but Parallels won't let me create a new virtual machine. The New, Open, and Preferences items are disabled on the File menu and the Control Center option does nothing (no window opens).
I've spent quite a bit of time in Google and searching this forum and can't figure out if I'm just not understanding how this thing works. I'm new to Parallels.
Thanks, Ken

 

Hi Ken,

Trial version of Parallels Desktop is valid for 14 days. Please check if your trial has expired.

 

No, it has not expired. It has 10 days or so remaining. Here's more information:

I found that if I somehow induce Parallels to crash, the menu options are re-enabled. Rebooting my Mac doesn't do it. I've been able to reproduce the problem in these steps:

1. Try to open Control Center. This will always result in the New, Open, and Preferences menu options to be immediately grayed out. Incidentally, I've NEVER seen the Control Center window in Parallels. It's never worked on my Mac. I never see an error message, Control Center just silently fails to open.
2. Induce Parallels to crash. I've found a reliable way to do this - try to open Control Center from the Mac's Menu Bar (not the notification icon in the upper-right by the clock). Once this silently fails, click the gear cog on the currently open virtual machine. Parallels will immediately crash and offer to send a crash report.
3. Restart Parallels and the previously grayed-out menu options are available again.

In the four days I've been evaluating Parallels I've had it crash 20+ times. This is not including the intentional crashes induced so I can get the stupid menu options back. This is a brand-new MBP I bought 2 weeks ago with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB SSD. The only VMs I've tried are the ones from Microsoft's Modern.IE web site. I'm a web developer and needs these VM's to test web site compatibility.

Is Parallels really this buggy and crash-prone? Is it a 10.0 thing? It's been out for a few months, shouldn't something this unstable have been fixed by now?