* Your fear is unfounded, the 'uninstall procedure' is nothing more than just dragging the app to the trash, you'll not lose any information (VMs and settings are saved elsewhere).
* It is acceptable, it is simple, it's fast, and solves the problem. It's called troubleshooting, it happens with all software. It's not possible to exactly know what is the nature of you specific problem, nor we have to, however, we know this procedure will fix the issue.
* Your Parallels support would say the exact same thing.
I thought you wanted to get that functionality back? If you refuse to follow, step-by-step, the knowledge base articles that were carefully created to help troubleshoot this kind of situations, software installation conflicts, that are not common but may happen due to the nature of software installation on Windows, I can't help you any further.
I'm sorry, you both came asking for help with a problem, you got help and clear, step-by-step instructions how to fix your problems, it's up to you now.
Last edited: Apr 28, 2014